Nurture Over Nature: Increasing Clock Speed to Win

We all know the traffic advertising “Speed kills”. But in startups “Slowness kills.” Speed is key. Speed in making mistakes, speed in launching your product, speed to market. 

 Investor & podcaster Sriram Krishnan wrote about Clock Speed: 

“The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns – the “clock speed” to use a CPU analogy. The easiest external measure for this is how fast you ship product. However, I’ve come to realize that is often hard to measure or hard to accomplish. You can’t ship hardware every week or make research breakthroughs every day.”

Environment and culture matters. If people around you move slower, you will naturally regress to that pace. Or from a positive perspective, if you are in a faster environment you will increase your speed and operating tempo. 

Watch and record (discreetly) the speed of how fast a barista in New York City or Tokyo makes a coffee versus say San Francisco (slower) versus anywhere in Canada or Europe (much much slower). There is a significant difference. 

Add the crazy crazy-quilt regulatory framework in Europe, plus the anti-business and innovation mentality. This adds much friction to the already difficult business of building startups and driving performance, whether from a personal and organizations perspective. This is peer pressure at an environmental level and it’s pernicious. Yet smart people know how to make this effect work for you. 

This is why I believe there will be great entrepreneurs from Europe and Canada but most will not stay there. Most will eventually migrate to the most competitive & presently biggest market in the world: the USA. They need to if they want to scale up dramatically. Even despite the crazy in America right now.

Steel sharpens steel and the best founders want to be around other great founders. This is where Tai Lopez’s 33% rule comes into play. If you really want to get good at something, you have to spend at least 33% around people better than you. He uses the example of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. You don’t get good fighting other white belts, you get good fighting practice with blue belts. 

Regional clusters have crazy strong network effects. This is why dystopian, badly run hellholes like New York, Los Angeles San Francisco at large will continue to have staying and drawing power. A place that will continue to be centers for the best and most ambitious founders around the world. 

Places that have high clock speed and provide an environment for the best people to compete and thrive.