move fast, break things shackling us to the inertia of the terrible status-quo

luck’s pyre, 2025.

I find myself often asking my team how we can move faster. I am constantly over-ambitious on timelines and consistently underestimating of deadlines. Urgency is one of my most valued traits.

This is nothing new. The startup founder has to move fast, or else, they will fail. One of the few correct definitions of a startup is any organization that is not supposed to succeed. If the odds are stacked in your favour, you are not a startup, you are an overpriced and overhyped south-indian restaurant in Bangalore.

If the odds are stacked against you, the only way to win is to move so fast that you get multiple rolls of the dice. You double-down on your gut hunch, aka your reason to exist, and keep iterating until you possess the ingredients to solve a huge problem an OOM or two better than any other solution.

Since the odds are never in your favour, betting on you is a huge risk, that only fools, angels and VCs are willing to gamble on. The former or latter (sometimes it may be hard to tell the two apart) are willing to give you significant money $’’k-‘M right off the bat but not a lot of it, as they in turn have to convince bigger fools or VCs to put money in them. This means that the fuel you have is not a lot. It may last you 2 years, give or take. Within those months, you need to get far out enough to raise a larger round, so you can go even faster, to repeat the process in another few years. Rinse and repeat, make sure to flush in between.

If your gut hunch is a good one, you are likely not the only one trying to do this. You have siblings, rivals or foes, depending on how you view their values compared to yours. They can often be older, bigger, better resourced, or more wise, than you. They may even have a greater right to winning than you. They are sometimes trying to go faster, but even if they’re not, they may still have bigger engines or a much better compass. The only way you can hope to get to the blue ocean first is to go faster or with better direction, or more likely both at once.

Not running out of money and getting there before competitors are two good reasons to constantly ask my team how we can move faster. But there is an even better reason.

The status quo is terrible.

The world may have improved dramatically over the years on some (mostly human) measures of well-being but there is still so much needlessly suffering in the world. We may live longer but we still die way too soon, often in cruel, pain-ridden ways. We slaughter millions of animals every day in torturous ways because we have not yet figured out a better way to feed ourselves. We seem to create new traps to shorten the width of the possibility spaces in dastardly creative and incredibly stupefying ways.

The most urgent reason to move fast is not to get more money or to best your rivals, but to forcefully widen the possibility space that allows us to break the inability or inertia that stops us from looking the crab in the face and saying not today.

Dogspeed.