[derefr]

I never said the VC's timeline is arbitrary! They're ultimately based in loan interest rates / bond yields / etc — as you say, the "cost of money."

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.