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by nine_k
2 days ago
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These timelines are not arbitrary. They are dictated by the cost of money (for the VC). They have little to do with the target market situation, and totally don't care about technical considerations. They only care if your profits, or at least revenue, or at least market share grows fast enough. If it does not, they write off their losses and liquidate the company. This is the fear that dictates the damned speed™: either you go up insanely fast, or you die. If your goals do not align with this approach, do not take VC money. If you want to develop things without haste, only join a startup with a proven PMF and insanely goos sales team, which takes care of hockey- stick growth so that you can concentrate on quality. |
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But the timelines that founders and CEOs can end up coming up with for the arbitrary subprojects/efforts they choose to pursue to try to get the company closer to giving those VCs the hockey-stick growth they demand, are much more arbitrary. Mostly in the sense that such subprojects/efforts can often be selected/pursued with no thought to the fact that either the goal is technically impossible within the chosen time budget; or, even if possible, that the effort won't demonstrate results within the chosen time budget, and so will be given up on whether or not it's working (because founders interpret absence of metrics as metrics relaying absence.)
Which is to say: if you can guarantee from before you start that a given subproject or effort will be considered "a failed experiment" — then you'd think it would be obvious that you shouldn't do that one. That you should put it on the backlog of things you can try after PMF + hockey-stick growth, when you have time to evaluate things thoroughly.
But that doesn't seem to be obvious to a lot of founders and CEOs. Many of them spend a lot of their and their employees' time setting off on efforts that everyone in the room basically already knows they'll be cancelling two weeks later, before said effort has had a chance to either succeed or fail on its merits.