Ask HN: Is speed the ultimate weapon for a startup? Let's discuss

3 points by dylanlacom 10 years ago | 2 comments

In the opening paragraphs of this First Round article http://firstround.com/review/speed-as-a-habit/, Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart and former Google Exec, states:

==== "I’ve long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win. Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.

In tech, speed is seen primarily as an asset in product development. Hence the “move fast and break things” mentality, the commitment to minimum viable products and agile development. Many people would agree that speed and agility are how you win when it comes to product.

What they fail to grasp is that speed matters to the rest of the business too — not just product. Google is fast. General Motors is slow. Startups are fast. Big companies are slow. It’s pretty clear that fast equals good, but there’s relatively little written about how to develop the institutional and employee muscle necessary to make speed a serious competitive advantage." ====

A few sentences from this excerpt stood out to me, particularly the "fast equals good" statement. Is this a generally agreed upon belief in the community here? If you do believe in it, can we provide some more evidence beyond what's provided in this article, and if you don't believe in it, why not?

greenyoda 10 years ago |

Speed is only an advantage if what you're building has value. If you're building a crappy product that nobody wants, building it faster isn't going to help you make money.

Also, the generalization that "startups are fast, big companies are slow" is a bit misleading. In many cases, big companies are building vastly bigger things than some startup trying to put out their first MVP. For example, if a big company like Facebook wants to roll out a new feature, it has to be built at a scale where it can be used by a billion people - which takes a lot of engineering. If a startup wanted to build a product to directly compete with Facebook, they'd have to deal with all the problems that Facebook deals with, and probably wouldn't have a speed advantage.

dylanlacom 10 years ago | |

Good points.

Sometimes value added becomes much clearer after a product or feature has been built and people are using it, in which case we don't have the option of choosing how fast we go by how much value we're providing. I think 'speed' is a subjective concept and 'fast' will be different depending on who you ask. For me, this makes it hard to think about what 'speed' actually means.