Go faster
If you want to win, go faster. If in doubt and uncertain, go faster. If you want to make $1B dollars, go faster. If you want to change the world, go faster.
Whether you’re founding a startup or investing in them as venture capitalist, you’re in a ruthless competition with the rest of the world. You’re competing to create and capture $1B for yourself and your partners & employees, and that means defeating all the other teams of people who are gunning for that exact same prize.
You’re also competing on time. Time is inexorable. You can make a million dollars by flipping burgers for long enough. For the (wannabe) elites, this will take too long. The start up / venture capital game is to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Yes, be patient, have vision, have a 50 year plan and all the standard Silicon Valley noob founder-friendly shibboleths. But the truth of this game is simple: you must grow really fucking fast for a really long time. You don’t earn the right to dictate a 50 year plan if you can’t survive the next 5 months.
This doesn’t mean go sociopath and treat every human interaction as a zero-sum transaction; it doesn’t mean take a bunch of stimulants and run around with your head cut off, but it does mean that you’re competing with people who are sociopaths and on drugs. You’ll need to out-execute, out-smart, and out-last them.
The median founder/CEO/executive/VC is a busy bee, but poorly organized and therefore not ruthlessly focused and fast enough on the 1-3 key tasks that they should be focused on at any given time.
If you can accomplish just one meaningful task a day as a founder / CEO / executive / VC, you’re already doing better than the median midtwit who putters around and can’t actually close a sale or ship a line of code or marketing copy. With ChatGPT taking over more and more white-collar tasks, median quality of founder/CEO/executives/VCs will further degrade because they’ll be puppeteered towards statistical norms.
I predict the % of people who are able to compete to be elite will be smaller and smaller, but the competition will be fiercer and fiercer. It’ll be a game of steeper and steeper power laws as each elite player has more and more leverage with AI tools empowering them.
Attention cliff system
In the elite founder and vc circles, the most successful people with the biggest operations are absolutely the fastest to respond. If they’re elite and they aren’t fast to respond to you, it’s fine to assume what you’re offering is not compelling for them at that time. No ego hit or insult intended. Just bring them something better and/or try again later.
As you progress in your career, your attention will be requested by more and more people and therefore you will be distracted and bogged down. You prevent this by deeply understanding your priority relationships and focus areas. Be 24/7 available for the priority relationships and construct a steep cliff system for those that are not. As curiosity allows, randomize and add entropy to continuously learn and evolve your knowledge and network. Attrite people out who fall out of your focus areas. It’s OK. You don’t owe anyone your time.
Your steep cliff system should look like this: ghosting 90% of inbounds, top 9% or less gets punted to an executive in your organization, and the top 1% or less you handle directly.
The elites earn their place because they’re super fast and super good. And they remain there with focus. If they lose focus, they quickly attrite away as new, fresh, and focused players take their share.
Decision default
Because you as a founder/CEO/executive/VC always have your attention requested, it becomes taxing to invest full energy into making decisions from first principles all the time. Therefore you must always have a default decision for every type of request. Thinking is only needed when new information is presented. If there is no new information, then don’t change your decision.
This is how you set your default decision:
For VC’s, any new investment is a default no.
For founders, any time/money/energy allocation on a project that is not making your product better, selling the product, hiring people, or raising money is a default no. And if it’s yes and it’s also a top 3 constraint for your business, then it’s yes yes yes go way fucking faster yes.
New information should be the only way you alter your decision. So if people chirp at you with noise or emotion, doesn’t matter, no change. If they bring data; then further investigate and collect more info before re-deciding.
Don’t putter around paralyzed and loosely staying busy until someone else forces a deadline on you.
Instead stick to your default and be default decided. This means you have no loose dangling workstreams; they’re either actively 100% worked on, or they’re 100% shut down. When new info is presented and intriguing, sprint at it by immediately calling experts and read to maximize context until you are confident to recapitulate your default or you set a new one.
In general, you want to minimize the number of decisions that are forced on you by someone else’s timeline. You can mitigate this by having discipline on your default and being really smart and really fast, so you can level the information asymmetry on any domain so it’s no longer their timeline but yours. This is why going fast is so important. The faster you are, the more time works in your favor.
Time is always on someone’s side. Make time your ally. There’s the Latin proverb: Fortune favors the bold. I say: Time favors the fast.
Transactional comms protocol
There are many transactional updates and new information to share with partners, employees, customers, and investors. A customer insight, a new intro from a trusted partner, an interesting story and data point to share that might change a product or sales approach. To transmit this information: I call, text, email in that order.
I usually call twice. Once to ping, and second to breakthrough any do not disturb. 50% of the time they pick up, and we can get the information exchange done in 5 minutes.
If they don’t pick up, I immediately text the content. Then depending on the content, I also email it.
Go fast, don’t schedule a bullshit zoom call 2 weeks out. No one has enough time for that. If they don’t get back to you quickly, they’re not going to make it.
Write
If there is a big investment (as a VC) or strategy shift (as a founder/CEO), then I expect to write or read a memo. Writing forces clarity. And I respect my partners, investors, and employees to give them clarity of thought so we can be efficiently debate and decide.
I see it as a sign of immaturity at best and disrespect at worst if people are not prepared with written memos that demonstrate clear thinking for a big investment or big strategy discussion they want to have with me.
I can read faster than you can explain anything to me. I am smart. I am fast. Give me the new information in a clear fast way so I can respond to you in a clear fast way.
The median founder/CEO/executive/VC gets confused by this directive because now they think they need to write a perfect Great American novel of a memo. No, now you’re too slow. If you have thought through the problem and proposal clearly, you should be able to articulate very quickly. Think clearly, so you can write fast. Write simply and directly present the argument with data. If you can’t write it quickly, then you don’t have clarity and mastery of your topic, so go work harder and be smarter and then come back to me.
Writing quality is low and will be even lower in the future. People suck at writing because they suck at thinking. With AI slop, writing and thinking ability will suck even more.
It’s obvious when someone copy-pastes ChatGPT. This is fine because ChatGPT is better at most tasks than an above average human. But if you’re sending me a mediocrely-prompted ChatGPT response as a work product, I'm probably going to be annoyed. I can prompt and context engineer ChatGPT 5 Pro than you can, so don't make me look at something that's negative value.
In summary: if you want to maximize your chances of being a winner, go faster. The way to go faster in the correct vector is to manage your attention and be systematized about your learning and decision making loops. Disciplined, efficient and structured communications with your collaborators allows you to iterate much faster.
In competition, there are only 3 attributes to compete across: being smarter, working longer, and working faster. It’s hard to become smarter and there is a human max on hours you can work. Working faster is the easiest thing to immediately upgrade. And now you have my blueprint on how to go faster. Go implement it now.