THE LAUREN PROJECT • Relativity of speed

Relativity of speed

This morning I decided our ugly office door had been an ugly office door for too long. I told Lauren I wanted to paint it black and get a Shelby sign made for it.

By the time I got out of our board meeting, Lauren had a sweet concept for how to lay-out our logos (ours and our officemates). By the time we finished eating and a quick game of ping pong, Vincent had the logos all done up… oh, and he had a friend with a laser cutter who could make us a stencil. Sweet.

Dan finished his day by hitting Home Depot for some supplies we needed and picked me up some paint. An hour later, my hands are covered in paint, but our door is painted black and ready for some sweet logo action tomorrow.

This story in and of itself, isn’t that interesting… but Lauren’s comment to me as I applied the second coat stood out…

“I’m still amazed at how fast we get shit done. At [my old job], there would’ve been a meeting to decide IF we should paint the doors, and THEN what color and so on…”

Lucky for me, I never worked for a big company. I don’t know anything about setting up planning committees. I’ve never had more than one person to ask permission to do something (and they usually just said, “yeah, don’t even ask next time.”)

So for me, this feels pretty normal. For Lauren, it is light-speed (and she loves it). Point is, speed is relative. And sure, I’m talking about painting a door - a trivial decision - but the speed with which we executed was awesome, that’s how it should be in a startup and that’s how we roll when it comes to decision making in general.

OK, so, Reece inadvertently stole my blog post (which I guess goes to show I still drag my feet a bit) but LESS WORK FOR ME SO YAY!

As some of you know, I came out of publishing, and as some of you also know, the publishing industry moves like thhhhhiiiiiiissssssss—that is to say, slowly. Maybe the pace was due to the fact that I was at was a big company, and decisions had to be made by committee and later approved by VPs. But I think for the most part, it just had to do with the fact that we were making books.

Making books urgency: “we should probably think about getting that done soon”
People would submit ideas/items to an agenda. A meeting would be held to discuss what was on the agenda. The meeting would go on about 3x longer than needed. (Our meeting length got so out of control that I began timing each one and created charts marking the success of that meeting against other meetings, and meeting leaders against other meeting leaders. Betsy usually won.) We would nod and say, “Hm, yes, I suppose that could be a good idea. Lemme do some research and think on it.” By the time the follow-up meeting happened (maybe 2 weeks later), “thinking on it” had been done (maybe), but still, no action had been taken.

Tech startup urgency: “get it done yesterday”
[things: done]

As Reece said, speed is relative, and I think individuals tend to move as fast as the people around them. I’m not suggesting that our way is necessarily the right way or a better way, but when you’re on a team this gung-ho, it’s hard to imagine slowing down.

Source: reecepacheco