The Perils of Prudence (summary)
Summary of an essay by Abraham Thomas, published in Pivotal on 21 January 2023. Read the full essay on Pivotal →
Abraham Thomas argues that for startups, speed reduces risk, and that “prudent” slowness is the riskiest strategy of all. In most of life, going fast is riskier than going slowly. But in environments that are both unknown and unforgiving, where the risks of failure grow faster than linearly with time, the safest course is to spend as little time exposed as possible. Roald Amundsen understood this on his race to the South Pole; Robert Falcon Scott did not. Startups live in the same conditions.
What paradox does the essay resolve?
Two common beliefs contradict each other: “speed is a startup’s key advantage” and “startups are a marathon, not a sprint.” Thomas’s resolution is that speed is how you survive the marathon: moving fast is the way to reduce long-run risk.
Why did Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole?
| Roald Amundsen | Robert Falcon Scott | |
|---|---|---|
| Resources | About a third of Scott’s funds and a fifth of the men | Far larger budget and team |
| Transport | Dogs and skis; never man-hauled | Dogs, ponies, motor sledges, and heavy man-hauling |
| Journey | 3,440 km in 99 days; the party gained weight; worst affliction a toothache | 3,200 km in 148 days; starvation, scurvy, frostbite, injury; the polar party died |
| Approach | Small team of multi-skilled specialists; one strategic goal; flexible plans, fully committed; never more than 6 hours’ skiing a day | Large convoy; rigid, detailed plans; naval discipline; multiple goals; redundancy over flexibility |
Amundsen’s “one big secret”: in polar exploration, moving fast reduces your risk. On the polar plateau nothing sustains life, so every extra day adds exposure to exhaustion, starvation, accidents and unknown unknowns. Every one of Amundsen’s choices of equipment, transport, team and route served speed. “Glorious failure makes for inspiring memoirs, but it is failure nonetheless.”
Why does speed reduce risk for startups?
Startups operate in conditions that are:
- unknown: founders must discover almost everything about product, customer, channel, price and competition;
- unforgiving: most startups are “default dead”, with runway that ends before profitability.
In those conditions, speed de-risks in three ways:
- Speed is a startup’s only sustainable advantage. Incumbents have more of everything else: money, brand, people, reach.
- Speed gives more shots at goal. When everything must be discovered, more attempts mean more learning; “perfect is the enemy of good enough.”
- Speed hedges against burnout. Startups ultimately fail when founders lose faith, and slow, grinding progress feeds burnout.
How do common startup maxims follow from speed?
- “Move fast and break things”, because slowing down is riskier than making mistakes.
- “Do things that don’t scale”, because building for scale wastes time you don’t have.
- “Strong opinions, weakly held”, because hedging bets slows you down.
- “Two-pizza teams”, because extra hires beyond a minimum slow you down.
- “Hire for slope, not intercept”, because past velocity predicts future velocity.
- “Make the main thing the main thing”, because focus creates alignment and alignment creates speed.
Where else does speed reduce risk?
- Bar-tailed godwits fly 8,000–12,000 km non-stop across the Pacific each year. The route minimizes total energy use, exposure to predators and exposure to disease.
- Elite alpinists climb notoriously fast.
- High-frequency trading won by being faster, not smarter.
- Military theory, from Hannibal to Boyd, prizes speed.
- Magic: The Gathering bans cards that are too fast.
The pattern holds in any complex, dynamic, unpredictable environment.
Why don’t founders act on this?
“Almost everybody in the startup ecosystem agrees that speed is a good thing. Almost nobody acts like it.” People are taught that going fast is risky, so they fear launching early, looking sloppy and being criticized, and they bike-shed and add “one more feature”. Thomas’s conclusion for founders: it is not only okay but optimal to go “faster than comfort dictates; faster than feels prudent.”
Related
- Full essay: The Perils of Prudence, Pivotal, 21 January 2023
- Strong Opinions, Weakly Held (summary)
- The Worst Outcome Is a Mediocre Success (summary)
- Thomas’s review of Cherry-Garrard’s memoir of the Scott expedition: The Worst Journey in the World