Urgency Without Haste

The Startup Superpower You’re Not Using Right

Fast Isn’t Always Forward

You ever feel like everyone around you is moving too fast, but getting nowhere?

Same.

I’ve sat across too many founders with decks fancier than their products. Or worse, founders convinced that launching fast means they're “winning,” even when they’re flying blind. That’s when I say the line I now keep in my Notes app like a mantra, a lyric from Mumford and Sons:

“As it keeps my heart and soul in its place

And I will love with urgency but not with haste”

Let’s start there, because we conflate the two too often.

Urgency is a gift. It’s what gets you out of bed at 7am on a Sunday to tweak that onboarding flow. It’s what keeps your pitch deck honest. It’s the quiet hum of I care deeply and I want to build this right.

Haste? That’s just panic in high heels. Loud. Twitchy. Often self-sabotaging. It looks like:

• Announcing a launch before the product is stable.

• Raising money before you know what you’re even solving.

• Hiring because a podcast said “founder time is sacred.”

It’s performative speed. Motion for the sake of optics.

The startup world celebrates speed like it’s a virtue in itself. And yes, speed matters. But speed in the right direction matters more. Urgency is about velocity with direction. Haste is just motion.

One of my favourite phrases comes from John Wooden, the legendary UCLA coach:

“Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

Quick means intentional. Trained. Ready.
Hurry means reactive. Messy. Uncalibrated.

You can feel the difference in your gut. When you’re operating with urgency, you’re focused. Calm, even. When you’re rushing? You’re sweating the small stuff while ignoring the actual problem.

And here’s the kicker: the results compound. Build from urgency and every sprint adds up to something meaningful. Build from haste and you’re just digging yourself a deeper hole faster.

So this is your first checkpoint.

Ask yourself:

• Is this task actually urgent? Or just noisy?

• Am I sprinting because it’s right, or because I’m scared?

If the answer is fear, pause. Reframe. Then move with direction.

You don’t win by moving fast.
You win by moving right.

Your Nervous System Is Not Your Strategy

Let’s talk about your brain for a second.

Because the difference between urgency and haste isn’t just operational, it’s biological. Our nervous systems were built to escape tigers, not investor updates. And in startup land, we confuse that adrenaline hit for productivity. It’s not.

Here’s the science: under pressure, your brain stops seeking full information. It grabs at shortcuts. Literally. The parts responsible for nuance and foresight take a back seat, and your body screams: “Just do something, anything, now!”

That’s haste in a nutshell.

And it’s dangerous.

Because most of what breaks a startup isn’t a lack of talent. It’s poor decision-making under duress.

• You ship a broken feature to hit an arbitrary deadline.

• You hire a misaligned teammate because you’re drowning.

• You say yes to a term sheet because... what if no one else comes?

These aren’t bad calls because you’re not smart. They’re bad calls because your system is in fight-or-flight.

Now, urgency, that’s different.

Urgency activates attention, not panic. It’s what psychologists call “eustress”, or productive stress. It sharpens your focus, boosts short-term memory, and helps you do deep work with a deadline. That’s why sprints work. Why hackathons occasionally produce magic. Why some of your best ideas come at 11:57 PM.

But here’s the catch: there’s a limit.

It’s called the Yerkes-Dodson curve. Performance improves with stress…up to a point. After that, it tanks. Think of it like a bell curve. Moderate urgency? Peak output. Too much? Burnout, bad calls, chaos.

The problem is that most founders don’t know when they’ve crossed the line.

So here’s your sign:

• If you feel like you’re always catching up, you’re hasty.

• If every meeting ends with more confusion than clarity, you’re hasty.

• If you haven’t eaten, slept, or thought deeply in a week, you’re not urgent. You’re just exhausted.

Bezos once said, *“Being wrong is less costly than being slow, *if you can correct fast.” But that assumes you’re thinking straight.

Haste blinds you to correction. Urgency builds in recovery.

Before your next “move fast” moment, ask:

• Have I slept on this?

• Is this a reversible decision?

• Do I feel focused or frayed?

If you’re frayed? Stop. Rest. Come back.

Urgency should stretch you. Not shred you.

StyleStar vs. StyleStuck: The Price of Premature Scaling

Let me tell you a tale of two startups.
Same industry.
Same year.
Same opportunity.

One of them IPO’d.
The other folded.

Their names (for confidentiality’s sake) were StyleStar and StyleStuck.

Here’s what StyleStar did:
They took a whole year to do nothing... but learn.
No launch blitz. No VC-fueled land grab.
Just:

• Deep customer interviews.

• Ruthless testing of their margins.

• Obsessing over whether the math even worked.

Their CEO literally said, “The first year was just about proving this works. Do the economics work? Will we make money?”

Now, StyleStuck?
Day 10: paid ads.
Day 30: hired a growth team.
Day 90: announced a raise.
The CAC was sky-high. The product had bugs.
But the optics? Chef’s kiss. Until it wasn’t.

Because while StyleStar was boringly patient, StyleStuck scaled a problem.

Every new user added more losses. Every dollar spent just sped up the collapse.
Within two years, StyleStuck sold in a fire-sale.
Meanwhile, StyleStar IPO’d six years later.

The difference?

Not talent. Not market.
Just the willingness to delay dopamine.

StyleStar chose urgency: validating fast, refining hard, learning constantly.
StyleStuck chose haste: performative traction, rushed hires, vibes over viability.

We talk a lot about “product–market fit.” But the smart ones? They aim for product–market–profit fit.

Here’s why that matters:
VCs won’t save you if every new customer bleeds cash.
Hype won’t help if your retention curve nosedives.
And scale? Scale just multiplies whatever you’re already doing.
If you’re leaky, you’ll drown faster.

So how do you know you’re ready to scale?

Use this founder checklist:

• 30%+ month-on-month retention

• CAC recovery in 3 months or less

• Customers refer you without being bribed

• You’ve tested and fixed your worst-case ops day

• You’re bored of fixing fundamentals and hungry to grow

If you can’t tick at least three of those?
You’re not scaling. You’re sprinting toward a wall.

Build a foundation that doesn’t crack under speed.
It takes longer, but holds up better.

Because in the long run, traction beats traffic.
And unit economics always outrun unicorn dreams.

Mailchimp, Atlassian, and the Joy of a Slow Burn

Let’s talk about the billion-dollar startups that didn’t sprint.

No blitzscaling.
No hockey-stick graphs by month three.
Just patient, relentless, boring excellence.

Mailchimp started as a side hustle in 2001.
It didn’t raise a single rupee of venture capital.
It spent six years perfecting its paid model before it even launched a freemium tier.

That’s right. Six years before they gave anything away.
Everyone thought they were slow. Turns out, they were just building a rocket quietly.
Fast forward to 2021: $12 billion exit.
No investors. Full control. Founder-rich.

And then there’s Atlassian.

Founded in Australia with a $10,000 credit card, it grew through word-of-mouth.
No flashy PR. No big-bang launch.
Just a really, really solid product that developers loved.

They went eight years before touching venture money.
By then, they were already wildly profitable.
When they did raise, it wasn’t to fix anything, it was to amplify what was already working.

Scott Farquhar, the co-founder, put it best:

“If we’d raised money earlier, we’d have scaled too fast and probably broken the culture.”

And then we have Basecamp.

They didn’t chase valuation.
They didn’t chase growth.
They chased calm.

Jason Fried and DHH built a small, profitable, and deeply principled company.
While Silicon Valley chased unicorns, Basecamp chased sustainability.
No layoffs. No all-nighters. No nonsense.

Here’s the common thread?

None of them were “slow” by accident.
They were deliberate.

They built slowly so they could scale forever.

Urgency doesn’t mean rushing. It means moving with purpose.

And these companies didn’t confuse speed with progress.
They understood that the fastest path to longevity is depth—not flash.

Want to follow their lead? Try this:

• Build a “slow stack”: 3 high-impact tasks a day, no more.

• Create a “boring dashboard”: no vanity metrics, just the stuff that hurts if it’s wrong.

• Practice patience in public: Don’t post about launches you haven’t tested.

And most importantly:

Write your own timeline.
The startup world thrives on pressure, hype, and artificial urgency.
But nothing worth keeping is built in a rush.

So next time someone says, “Why aren’t you scaling faster?”
Look them dead in the eye and say:

“Because I’m building something that lasts.”

When VC Fuel Becomes Fire

Some startups die because they’re ignored.
Others die because they’re fed too much, too fast.

Let’s talk about the second kind.

Startups that didn’t fail from starvation
They failed from indigestion.

Exhibit A: WeWork.

A $47B valuation.
Hundreds of locations worldwide.
And at the core? A business model that made less sense the more you looked.

They weren’t a tech company.
They were a real estate arbitrage play- long leases, short commitments, massive build-out costs.
And they scaled it like it was SaaS.

Flush with billions from SoftBank, they grew without pause.
Because growth was the metric. Not sustainability.

We all know how that ended:
No IPO.
Executive scandals.
A fire-sale bailout that left employees stranded and SoftBank blinking.

Their sin wasn’t ambition.
It was haste, disguised as vision.

Exhibit B: Quibi.

Raise $1.8B pre-launch.
Hire Hollywood’s best.
Bet big on a brand-new format: bite-sized shows for phones.

Except... no one asked if users wanted that.

No testing.
No market feedback.
No course correction until it was too late.

Six months later?
Shut down.
Burned through nearly all of it.

The post-mortem called it “a $2B reminder that ideas don’t scale. Execution does.”

Exhibit C: Theranos.

We’ve heard the story a thousand times.

A founder driven by urgency to revolutionize healthcare.
But that urgency became deception.
The tech didn’t work.
The science didn’t check out.
But the hustle? Impeccable.

So Walgreens signed on. So did investors.
And so did thousands of real patients.

Theranos moved fast and broke trust.
And once broken, trust doesn’t scale.

Across all these failures, one lesson echoes loud:

Speed multiplies what’s already true.

If your model is broken, speed kills you faster.
If your product sucks, speed ruins your reputation quicker.
If you haven’t tested the basics, speed just sets fire to your future.

Ask yourself before you scale:

• Am I building a business or a bubble?

• Would I still launch this feature if no one saw the announcement?

• Am I raising money to grow or to survive mistakes?

Haste creates momentum you can’t control.
Urgency creates clarity you can build on.

And if your startup’s not ready for fuel?
More money just means a bigger explosion.

The Tools That Slow You Down to Speed You Up

Here’s the truth: most founders don’t need more hustle.
They need better brakes.

Because speed without control is how you crash your company into a wall of your own making.

Let’s talk tools.

First: Bezos’ Type 1 vs Type 2 Decisions

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has this brilliant framework:

• Type 1 decisions are irreversible.
  You screw them up, you're in trouble. These need time, discussion, and multiple voices.

• Type 2 decisions are reversible.
  You mess up? You just backtrack.

Most startups act like every decision is Type 1.
So they freeze, or worse, rush both types out of panic.

Great operators? They sort early.

Move fast on reversible calls. Move slow on bets you can’t undo.

Add this to your ops doc today:
Is this decision a one-way door or a two-way swing?

🔁 The 70% Rule

Bezos again.

“Most decisions should be made with ~70% of the information you wish you had.”

Waiting for 100% means you're too late.
But acting at 30%? That’s gambling.

This rule gives you permission to move without waiting forever
But also demands course correction when you’re wrong.

And that’s the second part most people skip:
Speed is only useful if you can adapt quickly.

Lean Startup Thinking

Eric Ries didn’t write The Lean Startup so you could launch faster.
He wrote it so you could validate smarter.

• Build MVPs that test assumptions, not egos.

• Use fake landing pages.

• Run concierge tests.

• Ask users to pay before you build the full thing.

Speed that teaches is good.
Speed that hides is dangerous.

If you haven’t tested the most painful part of your value prop, you’re not ready.
You’re stalling in disguise.

Use This Mini Framework

Before every “move fast” sprint, ask:

1. What are we trying to learn?

2. What’s the smallest way to test that?

3. Can we walk it back if we’re wrong?

If the answer to (3) is no?
Slow. It. Down.

Urgency is about high-leverage learning.
Haste is skipping the tutorial.

Startups aren’t about being right all the time.
They’re about being wrong faster and cheaper than everyone else.

And that takes process.

Designing a Culture of Urgent Calm

This one’s for the founders.
Because the speed your team moves at?
It starts with you.

If you’re frantic, reactive, always-on
Your team will be, too.

But if you build a culture of urgent calm
You unlock something wild: focus, clarity, momentum that lasts.

What is Urgent Calm?

It’s not slowness.
It’s not chill-for-the-sake-of-it.

Urgent calm is:

• Shipping without drama

• High agency, low panic

• Teams that move quickly because they know why, not because they’re scared

You’ve seen the other kind of culture:

• Meetings every hour

• Announcements every day

• “We need to move fast” shouted across Slack like a war cry

That’s not urgency. That’s noise.

And noise burns people out.

Set the Tone from the Top

If you’re glorifying hustle porn, you’re setting the team up to crash.

Instead:

• Celebrate clarity over chaos

• Reward teammates who catch bugs, not just those who launch fast

• Normalize rest. Not as a perk, but as fuel

Your job is to create an environment where speed feels safe.

Where people can move quickly because they’re supported, not because they’re scared of missing a KPI.

Small Habits, Big Calm

• No-Meeting Days: Protect blocks for deep work

• Pre-Mortems: Before launching, ask “How could this fail?”

• Weekly Demos, Not Daily Fires: Ship often, but reflect regularly

• Celebrating Pauses: Give shoutouts for saying no, not just yes

One founder I know publicly praised a PM for delaying a feature because it needed more user testing.
That one moment changed the team’s relationship with speed overnight.

It said: we move fast, but we don’t move blind.

Want a quick gut check?

Ask your team:

• “Do you feel like you’re moving fast, or just scrambling?”

• “Do you know what matters most this week?”

• “When was the last time you said ‘no’ to something urgent?”

Their answers will tell you if you’ve built calm urgency or accidental haste.

You can’t fake this.
Culture shows up in your calendars, your messages, your meetings.

So build the kind of team that runs sprints like athletes, not like headless chickens.

Urgency without haste isn’t just a personal habit.
It’s a collective rhythm.

Builder’s Toolkit: 5 Actionables to Cultivate Urgency Without Haste.

1. The “Gut Check” Pause: Don’t React, Diagnose

Before you respond to any fire, Slack ping, or sudden panic, take 60 seconds. Not to zone out, but to check in. Ask yourself:

• Is this a real emergency or just emotionally loud?

• If I did nothing for 12 hours, would the world end?

• Am I trying to fix the problem or avoid feeling powerless?

You’ll be shocked how many “urgent” situations melt into background noise the moment you name them.

Founders often move fast because stillness feels like failure. You’ve internalized motion = momentum. But there’s a huge difference between being “on top of it” and being swept away by it.

So, here’s the actionable ritual:

1. When overwhelmed, set a 1-minute timer.

2. Breathe. No scrolling.

3. Write down, on paper, what’s actually happening.

4. Label it: urgent, important, emotional, or irrelevant.

5. Then move with clarity.

Over time, this rewires your instinct from “fix fast” to “frame first.”

The most dangerous founder trait isn’t indecision.
It’s acting before you've even defined the problem.

Urgency without haste begins in the nervous system.

2. The Pre-Mortem Ritual: Assume Failure, Then Prevent It

Before you ship that new feature, launch that campaign, or announce that hire, run a pre-mortem.

What’s that? A guided exercise where you assume everything goes wrong, and then work backwards.

Get the team together. Tell them:

“Imagine it’s 6 weeks from now, and this launch failed. What happened?”

Then ask:

• What broke?

• What did we ignore?

• What did we move too fast on?

Let people say the uncomfortable stuff. No judgment. No dismissing. Just collect data.

This exercise builds slow-thinking reflexes into high-speed environments. It allows space for the people who don’t usually speak up: the cautious, the skeptical, the system-thinkers.

Most teams operate with optimism as default.
But great operators build buffers, not just hopes.

What this does:

• Surfaces assumptions before they trip you up

• Creates psychological safety around dissent

• Shows you how fragile your “ready to launch” actually is

Run a pre-mortem for anything that touches users, money, or brand. 30 minutes. Tops.

It will save you 10x that in cleanup.

3. The Reversible Decision Sprint: Use Bezos’ 70% Rule with a 48-Hour Clock

Most startup decisions aren’t fatal. But founders treat them like they are, and end up paralyzed or, worse, overcorrecting with too much force.

To remind you of the framework:

Type 1 decisions are irreversible: make them slow, with care.
Type 2 decisions are reversible: make them fast, with enough information to act and space to course-correct.

Here’s your sprint framework:

1. Classify the decision: Type 1 or Type 2?
   If it’s reversible, move it into sprint mode.

2. Gather ~70% of the information you think you need.
   That’s your cut-off. Don’t go chasing ghosts.

3. Set a timer: 48 hours. Make the call.

4. Assign one person the job of tracking the outcome, good or bad.

5. Schedule a post-mortem in 7 days.

You’ll be stunned by how many “big” decisions shrink with a 48-hour sprint rule.

Because here’s the secret:
Startups die more often from too much inertia than from small mistakes.

This framework:

• Saves emotional bandwidth

• Builds decision muscle

• Creates fast feedback loops

Your org doesn’t need perfect calls. It needs clear velocity + corrective humility.

So next time you’re stuck:
Cut scope, sprint the call, review the outcome.
That’s urgency without the panic.

4. The Calm Company Calendar: Design for Recovery, Not Just Execution

Speed isn’t a strategy.
And meetings aren’t progress.
But if you don’t guard your team’s time, chaos creeps in disguised as “alignment.”

Let’s fix that with a calendar that breathes.

Start with this 5-step rhythm:

1. No-Meeting Mondays: Protect deep work. Nothing except true emergencies.

2. Triage Tuesdays: Review roadblocks. Set weekly priorities. Kill what’s not working.

3. Working Wednesdays: Full execution mode. No context-switching.

4. Demo Thursdays: Ship something. Show something. Celebrate progress over perfection.

5. Feedback Fridays: 30-minute check-in. What was messy? What felt good? What’s unclear?

Layer in:

• Slack-off hours (2–5pm Friday? No pings unless it’s on fire.)

• Rest normalization (Did someone take a random Wednesday off? Shout it out on Slack.)

Here’s what this does:

• Cuts urgency theatre (the illusion of being busy)

• Reduces reactive context-switching

• Builds a rhythm of recovery into your operating cadence

Remember: even Formula 1 drivers have pit stops.

Urgency that doesn’t plan for rest is just haste in disguise.

5. The “Scaling Gate”: Don’t Grow What Isn’t Working Yet

Before you pour fuel on anything, run this test:

Would your system hold if demand doubled overnight?

If the answer is even hesitantly no, you’re not ready to scale.
You’re ready to stabilize.

Founders often equate traction with readiness.
But here’s what real readiness looks like:

• Retention > Acquisition

• Margins you don’t need to squint at

• Ops that won’t collapse under pressure

• A product that can survive a bad week without bleeding users

Write your own checklist. Literally. Here’s a starter:

We will not scale until…

• 3 consecutive months of cohort retention ≥ X%

• LTV > 3x CAC

• 80% of customer complaints are resolved within 24h

• No team burnout flagged in 2+ weeks

• NPS > 30 with >50% response rate

These aren’t vanity guardrails, they’re reality checks.

Because scale multiplies both greatness and garbage.
You want more people using what works, not amplifying what breaks.

Urgency says, “Let’s earn our next level.”
Haste says, “Let’s skip steps and hope for the best.”

Spoiler: the best rarely shows up when invited like that.

Slow Is Smooth. Smooth Is Fast.

You don’t have to hustle yourself into the hospital to build something great.
You don’t have to launch in 30 days to prove you’re serious.
And you absolutely, categorically, do not need to grow before you’re ready.

But what you do need?
Is to learn how to hold urgency without breaking under it.

Because here’s the paradox no one tells you:

The best founders I’ve met move fast, but never out of fear.

They don’t confuse noise for signal.
They don’t announce just to seem alive.
They ship. They think. They breathe. Then they do it again.

They understand this core truth:
Panic makes you dumb. Urgency makes you sharp.

And over time, the teams that win are the ones that can tell the difference.

So if you’re building right now, take this as your pocket manifesto.

Move with love.
Move with intent.
Move with eyes open, hands steady, heart invested.

If you feel pressure, make it directional.
If you feel speed, make it intentional.
If you feel stuck, make the next step smaller, not faster.

Because that’s the work.

That’s what makes the difference between
a one-hit wonder and a generational company.
a founder with hustle and a founder with clarity.
a product that breaks and a product that bends, learns, grows.

You don’t owe the world “fast.”
You owe it real.

So build like it matters.
Scale like you mean it.
And remember

Slow is smooth.
Smooth is fast.
And fast is meaningless if you’re headed nowhere.