[greenyoda]

Speed is only an advantage if what you're building has value. If you're building a crappy product that nobody wants, building it faster isn't going to help you make money.

Also, the generalization that "startups are fast, big companies are slow" is a bit misleading. In many cases, big companies are building vastly bigger things than some startup trying to put out their first MVP. For example, if a big company like Facebook wants to roll out a new feature, it has to be built at a scale where it can be used by a billion people - which takes a lot of engineering. If a startup wanted to build a product to directly compete with Facebook, they'd have to deal with all the problems that Facebook deals with, and probably wouldn't have a speed advantage.

[dylanlacom]

Good points.

Sometimes value added becomes much clearer after a product or feature has been built and people are using it, in which case we don't have the option of choosing how fast we go by how much value we're providing. I think 'speed' is a subjective concept and 'fast' will be different depending on who you ask. For me, this makes it hard to think about what 'speed' actually means.