Demand Velocity, Offer Heart

It seems like every day I’m hearing about how important velocity is in startup building. But I think the fixation on velocity ignores many other components of the build cycle - people think about velocity as a scalar, not a vector.

Across the years, I’ve worked at Branch , mParticle , Runway , and Ramp , and consulted to a dozen more, including Airbnb, Walmart, JP Morgan Chase, Notion among others. I’ve seen companies move really fast and really slow. It wasn’t universally true that the fastest-moving companies were the most successful.

In fact, while velocity absolutely matters at the start of a company’s lifecycle, if the intensity isn’t balanced with more measured elements of company building, over time you see an inverse curve, where productivity decreases because the fixation on “velocity” becomes maniacal and paralyzes teams from growing important cultural norms as they scale.

So what are teams to do? How do you know if you’re moving fast enough? When is the right time to consider slowing down to speed up? Can you have it all — high speed over time and incredible culture?

Three things stick out in my mind that help teams maintain optimal speed in the long run.

Thoughtfulness: Sounds so simple, but in the rush to do work and build, people forget to be thoughtful. This often starts at the top of a leadership team. Leaders forget to do simple things like say “Thank you” and “I’m grateful to you” or admit when they were wrong and why. Teams forget to have fun and make time for bonding. It’s not because they don’t care, but because time doesn’t allow them to show their care. It’s not a surprise that people are gravitating to the Swedish idea of “Fika” for this reason!

So, some simple questions for fast-moving startup operators: Have you thanked your other co-founders this week? Have you celebrated with your teammates? Have you discovered what your peers might be going through? If you’re going multiple days or weeks without this, then you’re using velocity as a scapegoat for real relationship building and you’ll pay the price later.

Expectations & Boundaries: Many startups fail to set adequate expectations with their teams, and, by consequence, do not model good behavior for boundary setting. This often happens right after a company raises a big round. Everyone’s elated. The world is your oyster! And in the rush to hire, you overpromise. Maybe it’s small - a title that’s out of place. Extra ISOs that create the first sense of inequity. These small misalignments, however, scale just as quickly as your company does. They fester resentment which then becomes contagious. Velocity is hard to maintain with turnover. Invest the time in setting the right expectations with your early, hungry team members. Expectations aren’t just about comp either - it’s comp, title, promotions, team size, how you work, when you work, what you prioritize, how fast you move, working hours, and what you are and aren’t willing to compromise on. Make all these things explicit from the start.

Similarly, leaders need to model norms with the boundaries they set between work and life. It’s true that if the team sees its early founder leaders hustling 24/7 it will create an environment that prioritizes speed - monkey see, monkey do. But to what end? There will always be more work and new milestones. The incentives of founders and employees will always have an order of magnitude difference, and so unless you aim to refresh employees for strategic purposes, pushing the pace without a care to its sustainability will lead to burnout.

To sustain maximum velocity over time, you have to create, maintain, and model personal boundaries. This means making time for things that may hinder velocity in the short-run, but accelerate your culture, like carving out personal time, exercising, committing to mental health, making breakfast with your kids, reading a book, or going for a dog walk. Leaders doing these things gives permission to everyone else to do these things. Taking care of yourself shouldn’t be some secret - it should be embraced, especially so that you can set the standard for this balance. And leaders who work hard, push the pace of velocity AND take care of themselves set the bar for performance quality over the entire company.

Heart: Maybe this encapsulates it all, but velocity often runs directly orthogonal to heart. Working with heart means believing that human relationships are at the core of everything great. There’s the old adage “It’s not what you say it's how you say it” - and heart represents how you build product, not just how quickly you get it done. Focusing primarily on velocity encourages people to leave heart behind.

When you’re working fast, it’s hard to do the work that builds heart — like having compassion for people in tough times, or sitting down to talk through feedback and critical moments of misalignment. But just like misaligned expectations, heartless product velocity creates a rot in your organization that can grow over time. One of the better examples of heart in action I've seen is from Geoff Charles who by all accounts has been at the forefront of small, high-velocity product teams. But frequently at Ramp he would stop in the hallways to ask people how they were doing. Even sharing deeply personal stories with me in my own moments of hardship. As I learned from Geoff, if you demand velocity from your team, you have to be willing to offer heart.

Velocity is obviously very important in startup building. However, more founders and operators need to think about product and company building as a vector: it has speed and direction. Velocity in particular represents displacement over time. Displacement is not just what you build, it’s what you change in the world. It’s not just the product work, it’s how you do the work.