Everyone wants speed until they see what it costs
Ask any founder if they want to move faster and the answer is always yes. Nobody asks the follow-up question: faster at the expense of what?
I have started companies in media, gaming, and technology. Every one of them hit a point where speed and something else pulled in opposite directions. Nobody warned me ahead of time, so I want to name it plainly here.
The trade-off is not time versus money
That is the trade-off people talk about. It is real, but it is not the one that actually costs founders their companies.
The real trade-off is speed versus reversibility. Every fast decision closes a door somewhere. Sometimes that door did not matter. Sometimes it was the one you needed six months later.
When I built out studios that eventually became part of a larger group, we moved quickly on hiring, on tooling, on which markets to enter first. Some of that speed paid off. Some of it locked us into structures that took a long time to unwind. Nobody sat me down and said “this decision is reversible, that one isn’t.” I had to learn to ask the question myself, every time, before I moved.
Two kinds of fast
There is fast that keeps your options open, and fast that closes them. Both feel identical in the moment. That is the trap.
Fast-and-reversible looks like: testing a pricing model on a small segment, hiring a contractor before a full-time employee, launching a limited version of a product before committing engineering resources to the full build.
Fast-and-irreversible looks like: signing a long lease, taking on investors whose expectations do not match your timeline, structuring equity in a way that is painful to change later.
The first kind should be done constantly. The second kind deserves the opposite of speed. It deserves the slowest, most deliberate thinking you have.
Most people do not sort decisions into these two bins. They have one setting: fast. That works right up until it doesn’t.
How I actually sort them
Before I commit to anything that matters, I ask one question: if this turns out wrong, how long does it take to undo?
If the answer is days or weeks, I move immediately. Waiting adds nothing but delay.
If the answer is months or years, I slow down, even if it feels like I am losing momentum. I would rather lose a few weeks of speed than lose a year unwinding a bad structural decision.
This sounds obvious written out. It is not obvious in the moment, because the pressure to move fast rarely announces itself as “this is reversible” or “this is not.” It just shows up as pressure. Investors want an answer. A partner wants a signature. A team wants direction. The urgency feels the same whether the decision is a light one or a heavy one.
So I have trained myself to pause and classify, before I answer the pressure at all.
Where this shows up outside the boardroom
I fly, and I dive, technical wreck diving specifically. Both activities have taught me the same lesson in a different language. In the air, some decisions are reversible mid-flight, you adjust and correct. Others are not, you commit before you ever leave the ground, because there is no correcting them once you are airborne.
Diving is the same. Some choices you can revise at depth. Others, around gas planning, around your exit route, have to be right before you ever get in the water. You do not get to renegotiate them forty feet down.
Business rewards that same discipline, and punishes its absence in the same way.
What I would tell someone building right now
Do not slow everything down. Most of what you decide in a given week is genuinely reversible, and treating it like it isn’t will just make you cautious in places where caution costs you nothing.
But find your handful of irreversible decisions, the ones about equity, structure, and long-term commitments, and give those the time they actually need. Nobody else is going to flag them for you. That is the job.
Speed is not the enemy. Speed applied without sorting decisions first is.