The Prejudice Against Speed
I remember consulting for two co-founders involved in a clothing marketplace early last year. After sending through my proposal, we were discussing how my experience could help orient the business toward early traction and resiliency. At one point, I used a word deliberately: speed.
The reaction was almost involuntary - a wince, and the subtle impatience that remained after realising our philosophies were incompatible. Acknowledging this, I clarified that I did not support speed at the expense of quality. Recklessness, shortcuts, or technical debt disguised as ambition are never justified. What I intended was agility - the ability to move fast, adapt, test, and refine faster than incumbents can respond. The ability to learn before committing, and to pivot while it’s still cheap to do so.
Yet the hesitation lingered, and that reaction wasn’t unusual - I’ve seen it repeatedly across early-stage teams. I’ve recounted enough personal and secondary experience on this matter to verify that speed has acquired a poor reputation in startup culture. It seems to be conflated with carelessness rather than capability.
What Speed Is - and Isn’t
Speed is often misinterpreted as rushing - although in reality, it’s neutral. It merely describes how quickly decisions are made and acted upon, and not whether those decisions are careless or considered. This distinction matters, because the prejudice against speed rarely stems from the concept itself, but from how poorly it can be applied. Those failures deserve their own names - and for that, there are many other words in the English dictionary better suited. I much rather focus on the benefits of speed when leveraged.
In practice, speed means doing things just thoroughly enough to learn before investing further. It is building a feature that answers a question, not one that anticipates every future edge case. It’s also testing three marketing strategies lightly instead of betting the entire budget on one, and focusing on iteration while user needs are still fluid and underdefined, rather than freezing decisions in the never-ending pursuit of perfection.
Quality still remains vital - but in early-stage products, it’s better measured by fitness for learning rather than polish. Especially in young companies where this compromise is forgivable and polish is not expected, the best way of continuously serving your users is by staying afloat and responding to constant feedback as the product gets increasingly validated. A solution that is robust in validating assumptions, gathering feedback, and exposing the reality of demand is often far more valuable than one that is pristine yet untested. Speed is how startups buy clarity before commitment.
This approach increases responsiveness, but more importantly, it accelerates learning by revealing more flaws in the process. This is natural, and an indication that the process is working as intended. This particularly benefits startups for the simple reason that they aren’t expected to be perfect. New businesses do not have the unrealistic assumption of polish demanded for larger competitors, and thus can benefit from making changes in direction, launching underperforming features, or containing minor bugs as long as they display a willingness to listen and satisfy users.
A Startup’s Hidden Advantage
Startups cannot win by outlasting incumbents - they win by outlearning them. Large organisations tend to move slower not because they lack talent, but because hierarchical coordination, risk mitigation, and inertia are costly. Startups inherently have fewer people, dependencies, and sunk commitments (not to mention, the passion of early-stage companies is electric and unique in nature). This combination empowers startups with a powerful window where change is cheap - and speed is how that advantage is exercised.
When resources are limited and draining each day, waiting for the “right time” is rarely neutral. Every delayed decision still consumes opportunity, and every underutilised day remains paid for. Slow and methodical planning may feel responsible, but in certain environments with strict budget and time constraints, this can become quietly expensive. To combat this, trying quickly - interviewing users now, sketching today, shipping a small experiment this week - creates information. Information compounds, and momentum builds not only in the product, but in the team’s confidence and clarity.
Speed as Mentality, Not Metric
What I was trying to convey to those founders wasn’t specifically engineering throughput or sprint velocity - it was about mindset. Speed is a position towards uncertainty. It is the willingness to act without complete information, and understanding that clarity arrives through motion rather than deliberation. It is the recognition that enthusiasm is fuel, and that established momentum tends to reinforce itself.
Progress ignites momentum, and momentum sharpens judgment. Conversely, the prolonged hesitation that often disguises itself as prudence while diminishing conviction is toxic to any startup trying to do well towards its users. “We’ll address it tomorrow” feels harmless, until tomorrow repeats itself for months. In startups, hesitation compounds just as quickly as momentum - but only one of them creates learning.
At Rease, user feedback prompted a rapid shift from a transaction-based marketplace to a classified ads model. The change required a substantial architectural overhaul, delivered quickly under real production constraints. While edge cases surfaced, the speed of response by our in-house developers - paired with founder-led communication - served users first to preserve trust and avoid backlash.
The Honest Timeline Question
There is one more uncomfortable truth embedded in the advantage of speed - one that founders rarely articulate openly. Startups cannot last indefinitely without growth. At some point, reality intervenes. Unforeseen events may impact the business, and its resources - including human, monetary, or time - get impacted beyond an ability to continue sustaining it. Many startups, especially pre-revenue or funding, are racing against these conditions - presenting a need to validate or grow before they drop out.
Speed compresses the feedback loop. It helps answer the hard questions sooner: Is this working? Is this growing? Is this worth continuing? There is dignity and wisdom in discovering that answer efficiently. It affords the founder optionality. Would you rather confront that after one year, with energy and alternatives intact - or after three, when inertia and sunk cost have narrowed your choices? Speed does not remove risk - it surfaces it earlier, while it is still manageable.
Reclaiming the Word
The prejudice against speed is understandable. Many have seen it utilised poorly in an effort to justify sloppiness, burnout, or avoidable mistakes. However, abandoning the concept entirely cedes one of the few advantages startups genuinely possess.
When correctly understood, speed is not the enemy of quality, but rather the path by which quality becomes informed. For early-stage teams in particular, moving quickly is not about cutting corners. It is about leveraging the shared vision of a small team high in enthusiasm towards honest iteration, and precisely catering to user requirements. Speed enables startups to earn the right to refine - by first discovering what actually matters. I hope that distinction becomes clear to founders sooner rather than later.