Sunday Reads #191: If you want to build a new habit this year, make it "speed".
The COVID vaccine was created in less than a month. You can go faster.
Hey there! (and to recent subscribers, welcome!)
Hope you’re having a great weekend.
If you missed last week’s newsletter, here it is: There are no gatekeepers (except yourself, that is).
This week, let’s talk about speed.
1. Clock Speed.
I've been thinking about this short blog post from Sriram Krishnan:
The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns – the “clock speed” to use a CPU analogy. The easiest external measure for this is how fast you ship product. However, I’ve come to realize that is often hard to measure or hard to accomplish. You can’t ship hardware every week or make research breakthroughs every day.
I have come to realize there is often a simpler cultural test that one can apply which is the following.
When someone says “Let’s have a follow up conversation”, what is the implicit unspoken understanding of when that should happen?
What will be considered early, appropriate and late in a way that violates cultural norms?
In companies I’ve been at, that has ranged from a few hours to the next day to the next week to …perhaps never. This little test usually tells me a lot about how fast your organization / company works.
P.S I’m deliberately not being prescriptive of what the right clock speed is but if it’s over a week, you are definitely in trouble.
I had three broad reflections.
#1: Speed is, indeed, a competitive advantage.
As long time readers of this newsletter know, I talk about speed A LOT.
I first wrote about it in 2020's Speed as a competitive advantage:
You can generate a moat out of thin air, by simply being fast. By hustling.
Yes, speed can be a lasting competitive advantage.
In fact, as per Elon Musk, it may be THE lasting competitive advantage.
Says the man who’s started four multi-billion dollar companies:
The most important sustainable competitive advantage is fostering an organizational culture that supports a higher pace of innovation.
And if you want something more tweetable:
The fastest company in any market will win. That’s why companies need to make speed a habit.
Sometimes, you think it’s impossible for you to go any faster than you already are. If you go any faster, you’re sure things will break.
At such times, check out Patrick Collison’s list of examples of unbelievable speed. It’s called… Fast.
Some excerpts:
The Eiffel Tower was built in 2 years and 2 months; that is, in 793 days.
On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later.
Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. It shipped in beta in September of that year.
Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started.
Amazon started to implement the first version of Amazon Prime in late 2004 and announced it on February 2 2005, six weeks later.
On January 10 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. 3 days later, Moderna finalized the sequence for mRNA-1273, its mRNA vaccine candidate; the first batch was manufactured on February 7 [i.e., in less than a month].
You can always go faster.
In fact, this was one of my big reflections of 2021 as well, as I wrote in Step by step, ferociously (direct link here):
Speed is a competitive advantage. Maybe THE competitive advantage.
Learning from Frank Slootman, who has built two $100Bn companies (and one puny unicorn).
What's his secret to repeatable, gigantic success?
“You beat the slack out of the system.”
How do you do that?
Three (not) easy pieces.
1. Increase velocity: Push your org to move faster.
Set the organization's default speed to "Faster than we thought possible".
As Slootman says, when speed is all-important, people don't work faster. They do things differently. It becomes a "get shit done" culture.
2. Raise standards.
Move fast ≠ break things.
When stepping up the pace, inevitably excuses are made about quality. We can’t possibly move this fast, and maintain quality?
We would agree, because we are going to move faster and raise quality.
It has a compound effect on productivity. It’s not defying gravity, it’s beating reams of slack out of the system. Until the pressure is on, we don’t even know how much better and faster we can be.
3. Narrow Focus.
Most teams are not focused enough. I rarely encountered a team that employed too narrow an aperture. It goes against our human grain. People like to boil oceans. Just knowing that can be to your advantage.
At the company level and as a CEO, I worked to create blinding clarity and singularity of purpose.
Further Reading on Frank Slootman and his business philosophy: How this guy built two $100Bn+ businesses in 10 years.
She's right. Whatever you're doing, do it faster.
Speed is a force.
#2: "Feels like going fast" ≠ actually going fast.
John Cutler has a great graphic on busy-ness:
I need to re-learn this literally every day.
What gives you a dopamine hit ≠ progress.
Ticking off a todo ≠ progress.
Sending 10 emails in 15 min ≠ progress
Facing a difficult and important task, you end up doing many smaller unimportant tasks instead. Because it gives you a feeling of progress.
But as Ashley Whillans of Harvard points out, this is like saying, “Wow, I feel fat! Time to have another burger.”
#3: It's not just about speed. It's about the right kind of speed.
Latency >> Speed.
I wrote about this in How Amazon, Zoom and InMobi became antifragile, talking about a Twitter Space I had done the previous day:
As a startup, just saying “I’ll move fast” is not enough. It’s hardest to change direction when your car is hurtling down the highway.
Instead, run quick experiments. Learn, iterate, and move to the next one.
Speed is not what’s important. What’s important is frequency. Frequency of feedback.
As Shravan said in the Space, a system which has high frequency of feedback thrives. A system with bad feedback loops dies.
As Ravi said yesterday, the schools that adapted to the lockdown best were the ones that empowered their teachers to try different things. Some teachers tried teaching on Zoom. Some created interactive exercises. Some made students do puzzles.
And when something worked, the entire school was able to double down. While all the other schools were trying to figure out how to get kids to sit put while the teachers droned on on Zoom.
I usually don’t like sports analogies, but this one translates well:
Before we continue, a quick note:
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2. Authenticity is the new branding.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you know about Apple's new VR headset. Apple released the Vision Pro (at an eye-watering price of $3499) a few days ago.
I've only read a few reviews so far, but one has stuck with me. It's a review by... Mark Zuckerberg (click on the image to watch the video on Instagram).
And no surprises, he says that Meta's Quest is a better product.
Now, you might say:
"Oh, it looks so authentic!"
"Wow! He shot this video on a Quest!"
It's so easy to forget that this is, at the end of the day, just marketing for his own product.
In a world of sensory overload and fake news, we crave authenticity.
Authenticity is the new branding.
3. AI meeting notes... might not be the killer use-case we think it is. 🤣
Jeff Weinstein had a very productive meeting. Luckily, an AI bot transcribed it for the rest of us.
That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoyed it.
As always, stay safe, healthy and sane, wherever you are.
I’m traveling over the next few days, so I might not send an edition of the newsletter next week. See you the week after!
Jitha
[A quick request - if you liked today’s newsletter, I’d appreciate it very much if you could forward it to one other person who might find it useful 🙏].