DECISION MOMENTUM
Every founder I admire—every one—moves fast.
Not because they know everything.
But because they don’t wait to find out.
Startups have less of everything: Less cash. Fewer people. No brand, no customers, no resume fluff. No five-year plan. No buffer.
But they have one killer edge: Decision Momentum.
Each decision is just a small decision to learn something more about your customer(s), market, product, technology or just how to work better with other people.
DM is the velocity of judgment. It’s speed, yes—but speed with direction.
Not flailing. Not chaos. Just crisp, fast loops of decision → action → feedback → better decisions.
Instead of Eat → Sleep → Rave → Repeat, it is Decide → Ship → Observe → Repeat.
I call it decision momentum, as its decisions made rapidly with limited to increase momentum of the company. and if done by reasonably smart people, decision momentum almost always feeds into learning velocity.
Great startups chain these decisions together like lightning. Even when the fog rolls in.
Even when the map ends. They keep sailing.
Start-ups can become uniquely good at it. It’s an insane advantage because large corporation can never beat you at this. In fact, if you can out pace your start-up competition on this, everything else will take care of itself.
Big companies are terrible at this, they are structurally set up for DCF, which rewards lower variance and higher predictability. This by design slows people down, because every one is equally uncertain of the future - start-ups just frees you to act.
Execution quality and speed is a subset of decision momentum, as you constantly have to go do something to get new data to drive the next decision. But if you execute too poorly or too slowly - you really don’t get quality data fast enough to drive decision momentum.
To gain decision momentum, celebrate failures, give people permission to fail fast. Ask them to not be afraid of failure, but only slow failure.
Shipping a feature fast makes you learn what your customers value and get happy about or where they get stuck and where they fail. This gives you the data to drive decision momentum.
Design your organization structure, your codebase, your data pipes, your culture - everything to maximize decision momentum.
In my book, there are three forces that can increase your chances of building a great company: Decision Momentum (DM), Learning velocity, (LV), and Pain Endurance (PE). LV and PE live in your people. You can’t teach them. You hire them.
You find the hungry, the curious, the unkillable.
Decision momentum however is highly curatable through culture and practice. You can engineer that. You can scale that. You can live that.
Startups that move faster learn faster. Startups that learn faster win.
