Momentum is Everything

“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.”

“The key takeaway when a decision is made is much more important than what decision is made.”

“There are decisions that deserve days of debate and analysis, but the vast majority aren't worth more than 10 minutes.”

“You know you're going fast enough if there's a low-level discomfort, people feeling stretched, but if you're going too fast, you'll see it on their faces, and that's important to spot, too.”

“All it takes is asking the simple question, why can't this be done sooner? Asking it methodically, reliably, and habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of your organization.”

“In 2008, he was meeting with Tim Cook about a production snafu in China. Tim said, this is bad. Someone ought to get over there. 30 minutes went by and the conversation moved to other topics. Suddenly, Tim looked back at Sabi and asked, why are you still here?…”

“The untrained mind has a weird way of defaulting to serial activities, i.e. I'll do this after you do that after XYZ happens. You want people working in parallel instead. A lot of people assume dependencies where they don't even exist.”

“This is how I learned that if you can knock out big chunks of a project early, you can reduce the overhead of the remaining parts by 90%.”

“The one I see the most, and this includes at Google too, is that people hem and haw over what the founder or CEO will think every step of the way. Just get their input first. Don't get your work reversed later on. What a founder might think is classic cognitiv…”

“We offered one price of 50 dollars per employee per year compared to the wacky, twenty-page price list Microsoft would drop on you.”

“There's not always a stark tradeoff between something done fast and done well. Don't let you or your organization use that as a false shield or excuse to lose momentum. The moment you do, You lose your competitive advantage”

“This is especially valuable for startups who may not have every feature or bell and whistle that older competitors do, but oftentimes the feeling of speed and momentum will convince customers to risk it on a new player if they believe that that player's speed …”

“Newton taught us that an object in motion stays in motion, and an object at rest stays at rest, and nowhere does this feel more true in your bones than when you're running a business, which is why I think one of your most important jobs as an entrepreneur is t…”