Should leaders prioritize speed of decision-making over getting each decision right?

Sumeet Gajri · Jan 17, 2020

In a crisis the right method is to gather as much information and as many internal and external perspectives as possible, and to classify whether the decision is reversible or irrevocable before acting

Reversible decisions can be made fast and iterated on, while irrevocable ones like handling a security breach must be made carefully in real time; framing the problem this way moves you past the initial panic

52:59 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta

Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023

When the value of an idea is ambiguous, effort and reversibility should be the main terms in your evaluation function — if it is low-effort and easy to reverse, just try it

Time and attention are finite, so you need an evaluation function; cheap reversible bets buy information

8:01 20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality

Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023 · hedged

The 40–70% information heuristic is largely right but misses a reversibility dimension: where reversibility is low you should change your mind very early, and where it is high you should measure twice and cut once.

The cost of reversing a decision and its accumulated body of work should govern how quickly you switch.

Scope: 'largely right' as an endorsement of the underlying heuristic

22:17 20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality

Harry Stebbings · Apr 3, 2023

A leader's job is to distinguish the mistakes people must be allowed to make in order to learn from the ones they cannot be allowed to make

43:06 20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality

Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023

Letting people make their own mistakes only applies to highly reversible decisions, not to fatal ones

43:14 20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality

TJ Parker · Jun 5, 2023

Decision-making should be bifurcated: reversible decisions made as fast as possible without escalation, irreversible ones deliberated slowly until conviction is high

Making critical irreversible decisions rapidly produces a lot of bad decisions; if it's reversible and wrong you just change it, so the cost of speed is low

Scope: deliberation on big decisions frustrated his exec team

19:05 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack

Harry Stebbings · Jun 16, 2023

Speed of execution is everything, and teams should move as fast as humanly possible on non-core items — rather than adding more internal discussion and debate as Spotify's CPO advocates.

12:47 20Product: Slack CPO Noah Weiss on How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling Into Enterprise & What Needs to Change with your Product, Team and Processes when Scaling From PLG to Enterprise

Noah Desai Weiss · Jun 16, 2023

How much debate a product decision deserves depends on its class: two-way door decisions should be pushed down to teams with context and made locally with little discussion, while one-way door decisions warrant full executive buy-in.

Talk is cheaper than a bad decision, but decisions needing that much talk should not be the vast majority of product discussions.

Scope: assumes teams have context, understand the strategy, and have principles

13:15 20Product: Slack CPO Noah Weiss on How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling Into Enterprise & What Needs to Change with your Product, Team and Processes when Scaling From PLG to Enterprise

Ryan Petersen · Nov 13, 2023

You should move very fast and tolerate mistakes on two-way-door decisions, while one-way-door decisions should be reserved for senior people with a lot of judgment

Going the wrong direction is fine if you can reverse course, but irreversible decisions can't be corrected

Scope: you can't always tell early that you're going the wrong way — that's the art of leadership

19:38 20VC: Flexport's Ryan Petersen: Reflections on Leadership from 13 Years Leading Flexport, Why Velocity not Speed is Most Important in Company Building, How Money Creates Inefficiencies in Scaling, The Future of Trade with China & Why Remote Work is so Cha

Harry Stebbings · Apr 3, 2023

The overwhelming majority of decisions are reversible; very few are truly irreversible

Scope: Concedes intervention is obviously required in the fatal case

43:19 20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality

Rich Liu · Jun 7, 2023

Far fewer decisions are truly irreversible than teams assume, so in fast-changing markets you should take five shots on goal rather than wait for one perfect one.

No leader is the smartest person in the room or has data guaranteeing the right answer, and speed carries a 10x premium in a fast-changing market.

Scope: some decisions genuinely are 'glass balls' that must be done right the first time; especially applies when scaling

5:03 20Sales: PLG and Early Adopter Sales are Gone, How to do Sales Forecasting in 2023, Why You Cannot Do PLG and Enterprise from Day 1 at the Same Time and Which is Easier to Start, How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps with Rich Liu, CRO @ Everlaw

Harry Stebbings · Nov 13, 2023

Almost nothing in business is genuinely a one-way door — key hires, entering countries and product bets are all reversible; children are one of the few true one-way doors

20:11 20VC: Flexport's Ryan Petersen: Reflections on Leadership from 13 Years Leading Flexport, Why Velocity not Speed is Most Important in Company Building, How Money Creates Inefficiencies in Scaling, The Future of Trade with China & Why Remote Work is so Cha

Jeff Seibert · Nov 22, 2023

It is net better for a startup to be moving in a direction than to wait for the perfect direction, because the vast majority of decisions are reversible

Most decisions are Bezos-style type two decisions that can be undone and refined going forward; pausing a decision for a week leaves the team with nothing to do

Scope: excludes the minority of irreversible type one decisions

53:48 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits

Craig Courtemanche · Dec 4, 2023

Leaders should make many fast decisions whose blast radius is small enough to survive, rather than a few big ones

The speed and quality of decisions matters, and small decisions let you learn as you go without decisions that could tank the business

50:05 20VC: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO; The 21-Year Epic Journey of Procore to an $8.6BN Company, Advice from Tobi at Shopify on Being a Great CEO & Why The Idea of "Becoming an Entrepreneur" is BS with Tooey Courtemanche

Jesse Zhang · Sep 19, 2025

At their stage, almost all decisions are reversible; hiring mistakes are the main exception.

If a decision turns out badly they can simply reverse it, which isn't true of past hires.

Scope: says the company isn't old enough to know how decisions panned out

42:11 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

CEOs should aim to be right on the 5% of things that are mega important and accept being mostly wrong on the remaining 95%, changing course immediately when wrong

Most CEOs try to be right most of the time; the better model is listening, deciding regardless, acknowledging error and changing immediately, which lets people experiment and run with their ideas

Scope: cites Mati at ElevenLabs as the working example

78:22 20Sales: ElevenLabs: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota | How to Structure Sales Compensation Plans | Customer Success: 'Total BS' or Growth Engine? | Building an AI Sales Machine: What Tools & Tactics Must CROs Adopt Today with Carles Reina

Maggie Hott · Dec 14, 2022

Even in a hypergrowth company you should go slow to go fast — stepping back to examine a problem from all angles and identify blind spots before acting

She approved a $200,000 customer credit two weeks into her management career at Slack; big decisions on pricing, comp or team structure have long downstream impacts on customers and on her org's careers and earnings

Scope: applies especially to decisions with large downstream impact

46:51 20 Sales: Webflow's Maggie Hott on When to Start and How to Scale the Best Outbound Sales Team, Why Founders Should Not Hire a Head of Sales First, The Must Ask Questions When Hiring Sales Reps and How To Structure the Process

Lori Jimenez · Aug 2, 2023 · hedged

When a handoff or review lacks depth and feels like a read-back checklist, the cause is usually that the team is moving too fast — you have to slow down to speed up.

Speed pushes people into checkbox recitation instead of actually articulating and connecting.

Scope: 'probably' — offered as the usual cause

40:45 20Sales: Why The Founder Has To Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, When To Hire Your First Rep, Why Junior is Better Than Senior, How to Manage Sales Rep Compensation, How To Onboard New Sales Reps and more with Lori Jimenez, CRO @ WorkRamp

Scott Belsky · Dec 20, 2023

Sitting with an idea longer than is comfortable produces a better outcome than reflexive decisiveness

When running he forces himself not to stop and capture an idea, and the idea always gets better during that forced holding period — the same applies to giving feedback or solving product problems

Scope: decisiveness is still one of the best executive practices

43:59 20VC Roundtable: Spotify, Adobe & Linkedin CPOs on How AI Changes The Future of Product, Why AI is Now the Product, How TikTok Changed Product, Why Cost is the Biggest Barrier to LLM Usage & Why Incumbents Can Adopt AI Faster Than Any Prior Innovation Cyc

Aman Narang · Aug 21, 2024

Toast should have slowed down to speed up — getting foundations and culture right early would have made the long run much easier

On one hand it was a gold rush requiring speed, but measure twice cut once applies; the hardware they kept selling was coming back within ninety days

Scope: acknowledges the countervailing need to move fast when capital is cheap

27:09 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

When making a pivot or changing direction, leaders should deliberately slow down — provide context and the 'why', and ask questions rather than give answers — because optimizing purely for speed leaves you executing alone

Her own consistent feedback over 25 years has been 'go slow'; she found that building context and enrolling the team is what lets you go far, whereas moving fast alone means you turn around and no one is with you

Scope: especially when changing direction or making a pivot

20:14 20VC: HubSpot CEO on Where Value Accrues in SaaS AI | How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce | Why B2B Is Not a Winner Take All Market | How to Go From SMB to Enterprise an Win | How SEO Dying Changes HubSpot's Business with Yamini Rangan

Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025

As a company matures, the first priority must shift from initiative-taking novelty to maintaining and improving quality across everything, moving slowly so you can move really fast

The personality type excited by new ideas remains an important ingredient, but quality of what you already have has to come first as the company matures

Scope: Initiative-taking remains important, just not first priority

43:41 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Andrew Feldman · Oct 6, 2025 · hedged

The AI community is moving too fast and would get further by pausing to think and marching deliberately rather than sprinting

The opportunity is so big that everyone runs helter-skelter, tripping and falling; over a 30, 60 or 90 day period a deliberate pace would cover more ground

Scope: framed as his personal worry; measured over a 30-90 day horizon

30:17 20VC: Cerebras CEO on Why Raise $1BN and Delay the IPO | NVIDIA Showing Signs They Are Worried About Growth | Concentration of Value in Mag7: Will the AI Train Come to a Halt | Can the US Supply the Energy for AI with Andrew Feldman

Harry Stebbings · Nov 22, 2023

Activity itself drives progress and learning — if you're not moving, you're not learning

His own early podcast episodes were weak, but iterating through volume improved the topics, questions and guests over time

54:17 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits

Harry Stebbings · May 8, 2024

Founders need activity to generate enough data to know which direction to go; too many sit in a room and think for too long

61:31 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber

Tom Hulme · May 8, 2024

Starting to do something — picking up the phone, launching a product — generates data and information, so you need a very strong reason not to act

Action itself creates the information you need to learn direction

61:39 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber

Cem Kansu · Jun 20, 2025

Chasing 100% clarity before deciding is a massive mistake; leaders should decide at roughly 80% clarity and move faster

Debating for perfection slows decision making down

Scope: framed as his own weakness to improve

72:50 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo

Mati Staniszewski · Sep 8, 2025

The biggest risk is not taking the risk — staying put and failing to make a decision

69:44 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski

Thomas Plantenga · Feb 12, 2024

Depop's acquisition by Etsy made the UK feel existential for Vinted — nominally a two-way door, but one that could have closed permanently if they didn't win that year

Etsy looked like a company with infinite resources and a Silicon Valley technology team, while Vinted was 200 developers in Lithuania with little cash, so waiting risked there being no door at all

Scope: retrospectively concedes it was technically a two-way door

27:22 20VC: The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Marketplaces, Why Rule of 40 and EBITDA Optimisation is BS, How Founders & VCs Should Approach Market Sizing and Outcome Scenario Planning and Why Europe is Failing with Vinted CEO, Thomas Plantenga & Alex Taussig

Harry Stebbings · Feb 5, 2025 · hedged

Almost every decision is really a one-way door; genuine two-way doors are very rare

24:50 20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap

Max Levchin · Feb 5, 2025

Decisions that change your reputation or your relationships with partners are basically irreversible

25:06 20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap

Ryan Petersen · Nov 13, 2023

Speed is not the most important determinant of startup success — velocity is, meaning speed in the right direction, and sometimes the highest-velocity move is to stop entirely

Velocity is a vector; speed in the wrong direction is negative progress, and in a chaotic world like logistics you must be able to change direction without losing speed

Scope: especially in logistics, where COVID, carrier bankruptcies and tariffs upended conditions

18:50 20VC: Flexport's Ryan Petersen: Reflections on Leadership from 13 Years Leading Flexport, Why Velocity not Speed is Most Important in Company Building, How Money Creates Inefficiencies in Scaling, The Future of Trade with China & Why Remote Work is so Cha

Harry Stebbings · May 8, 2024

What matters is not speed but velocity — speed in a given direction

61:22 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber

Harry Stebbings · Oct 16, 2024

Velocity — speed in a given direction — is the most important thing for a company, not raw speed.

23:33 20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

Founders should be able to make hiring and deal decisions in the room rather than deferring to panels or deal-strategy committees

Deals often die because the account team has to go back to deal strategy; the best teams are enabled with tools to act while there's heat in the room, and the same applies to closing talent

Scope: founder-led early-stage context

51:46 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Jason James · Aug 29, 2025

Consensus building is bad — it leads to slow execution and worse, watered-down outcomes that carry nobody's conviction; better to empower an individual to make the call, test and learn

Decisions made by consensus get watered down and lack anyone's conviction, whereas an empowered decision-maker gets to an answer quickly, right or wrong, and can move on

13:29 20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi

Markus Villig · Nov 13, 2024

Speed is the single most important thing in startup growth, but only if executed with high quality

Many companies move fast by cutting corners and shipping things they shouldn't — that produces momentum but no real progress

Scope: conditional on high-quality execution

41:17 20VC: Bolt; The Most Insane Story in Startups | Turning a $5K Loan into an $8BN Company | Why Every VC Turned Down One of Europe's Biggest Winners | Competing with Uber & The Future of Micromobility and Self-Driving

Vlad Tenev · Jul 14, 2025

Shipping speed and safety should not be treated as counterbalancing forces in financial services; teams should be held to high quality (safe delivery) and relentless execution simultaneously

You have to protect people's money, but treating safety as a reason you can't ship fast becomes an excuse; once you know what to do you execute relentlessly at high quality

Scope: especially difficult in financial services; requires orienting the culture toward shipping fast

40:59 20VC: Vlad Tenev on Robinhood's $85BN Resurgence | Tokenizing SpaceX & OpenAI | Building Nine Revenue Lines Over $100M | Why Crypto Will Be Robinhood's Biggest Revenue Line | Why Stablecoins Will Replace Banking Rails

Stephane Kurgan · Jul 28, 2023

Once a decision is made you should stick with it; repeatedly revisiting decisions is toxic and paralyzes an organization

Changing your mind on a whim cascades down the organization and drives paralysis; he has seen it many times

Scope: applies after going through due process; legitimate to change your mind when genuinely new facts come to light

24:04 20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures

Danny Rimer · Jun 17, 2024

Leaders should follow Jim Barksdale's 'snake rules': when you see a snake, kill it immediately rather than studying it, and don't play with dead snakes (don't keep reopening decisions already made)

Teams that keep reevaluating the same choices stall; commitment must be total once a decision is made, and opportunities are hard to judge because they present as snakes

6:29 20VC: Index's Danny Rimer on Investing Lessons from Hits like Figma, Discord and Etsy to Missing Snapchat, Airbnb, Facebook & Spotify | Why Valuation is a Trap and Market Sizing, Signalling and Sector/Geo-Specific Funds are all Noise

Harry Stebbings · Nov 20, 2023 · hedged

Speed of execution may be the single most important thing in a business, especially in zero-to-one testing and iterating, though some decisions require far more deliberation

Scope: strongest in zero-to-one stage; some things need more deliberation

33:14 20VC: The Ultimate Hiring Playbook: Five Questions to Ask Every New Hire | What Makes Truly Great Leaders and How They Give Feedback | Do VCs Really Add Value; Lessons from Hard Fundraises with Matteo Franceschetti, Co-Founder @ Eight Sleep

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

Speed — of decisioning, of answering questions, of deciding and focusing on what matters — is one of the most important things in the early days

By the time you make a perfect decision it will be the wrong decision because the issue has already changed

16:48 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"

Kaz Nejatian · Aug 14, 2024

Deliberately increasing friction in a decision process raises the ownership burden on the decision maker, which improves the decision — as Founders Fund does with investment decisions

If there is no team to throw the task over the fence to, the decision maker must source and own the work themselves

30:22 Deliberately adding friction increases decision owner accountability and quality

Zach Perret · Oct 16, 2024

Being right matters more than speed: move fast is the right rule after product-market fit, but before PMF you should spend time gathering signal and data to determine the right direction.

Speed in the wrong direction before you know what's right wastes the effort; you should be right and then move fast.

23:10 Being right matters more than speed before pmf then move fast after

Kevin Ryan · Apr 10, 2024

'Move fast' is the most overrated startup advice — building and running a company is a series of situation-specific decisions and compromises where judgment matters most, and that is where good investors and CEOs add value.

Speed is worthless if the product sucks; no universal rule substitutes for judgment in specific situations.

57:08 Situational judgment not speed is the real differentiator move fast is overrated advice

Jason Fried · Jan 6, 2023

Big decisions are rare; the real cost of poor decision-making is the volume of small unnecessary decisions

Most decisions are small, so constantly making ones that didn't need to be made burns a lot of time and energy on things you never needed to worry about

25:57 Real cost is volume of small unnecessary decisions not big ones

Daniel Khachab · Oct 28, 2024

'Bias for action' and 'impulsiveness' describe the same behaviour and are only distinguished retrospectively by outcome, so founders should act impulsively anyway and accept the resulting mistakes

The same decision — like Bezos redirecting a plane to Paris on the spot — gets labelled bias for action if it works and impulsiveness if it doesn't; the judgement only comes afterwards

62:47 Bias for action and impulsiveness are the same behavior judged only by outcome

Stephane Kurgan · Jul 28, 2023

His own worst communication mistakes came from making and communicating decisions too fast, before the narrative was ready

Communication is storytelling, and building the right narrative, structure and words takes work and time

19:22 Communicating decisions before the narrative is ready causes the worst mistakes

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Binary, non-appealable yes/no decisions are more powerful than allowing negotiation, even though they produce false positives and false negatives

If decisions can be appealed you add up ad hoc meetings and more reviews; if yes is yes and no is no you move much faster, and the cost of some wrong calls is worth the speed

35:21 Binary nonappealable decisions beat negotiable ones despite error cost

Aaron Levie · May 22, 2024

The main thing lost at scale is cheap reversibility: a large company's decisions must be well thought out because reversing them a week later destroys alignment, so the central skill becomes timing exactly when to expose a working thing to the rest of the organization

A 20-person company can pivot instantly because everyone shares the hypothesis, but in a big company thousands of people are waiting to be told the thing is the thing — reveal too early and they live through the failure, too late and they ask what you were doing

31:10 At scale reversibility is lost so timing of rollout to the org becomes the key skill

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

Holding strong opinions loosely and canvassing the whole team on decisions is net a strength, though it has a real cost in decision speed

It forces the team to steelman the opposing side on every decision, but sometimes you simply need to make the call and instead get hung up

49:58 Canvass the team and steelman accepting slower decisions

Kathryn Minshew · Sep 2, 2016

Tabling a disagreement and returning to it later often resolves it, so founders should build in that space rather than forcing resolution in the meeting

It's common for one of them to sleep on it and come back agreeing with the other

6:19 Table the disagreement and revisit later

Fernando Fanton · Jul 27, 2025

The choice between decisive dictatorship and open discussion is a false dichotomy; you should always run the discussion because its cost is near zero compared to building.

Three hours of conversation costs nothing next to months of developer time, and someone still has to make the final call — which is different from being a dictatorship.

26:32 Discussion cost is near zero so always canvass before deciding

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

You should abandon a philosophy you have preached for years within days of seeing data that contradicts it

He ran a test on 7 September showing different incremental impact from search activity, called an all-hands on 11 September and changed the company's entire measurement approach two days later

27:57 Reverse a long held strategy within days of contradicting data

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Fast escalation of disagreements — agreeing or escalating within a day rather than debating for weeks — is a key driver of a company's execution speed

At Facebook senior leaders with opposing views would commit to either reaching consensus or escalating by end of day, which he ties to Facebook's historically impressive speed of execution

11:56 Fast escalation of disagreements within a day drives execution speed

Alex Taussig · Feb 12, 2024

Even two-way door decisions, if important, demand serious management bandwidth, capital and time commitment, so the real filter is whether the market is existential — and the UK was

To build a pan-European dominant peer-to-peer marketplace you have to have the UK, and there was no reason Vinted shouldn't get it, so persistence was warranted where other ideas were dropped

28:32 Even reversible two way door decisions demand full commitment when market is existential

Harry Stebbings · Jul 29, 2021

What will undo a leader is failing to understand which corners can be cut versus which corners cannot

A mentor gave him this and he has thought about it constantly for days

18:11 Leaders must distinguish safe corners to cut from corners that cannot be cut