Speed Rewards Action and Punishes Explanation
Startup culture talks about speed the way sports broadcasts talk about momentum: an almost mystical force that explains wins and losses after the fact. Go fast, ship quickly, make decisions while others are still scheduling meetings—that’s the ethos. Speed creates visible progress. Progress attracts talent and capital. In that sense, the bias toward action is rational.
But speed also has a quieter cost. It rewards people who act and systematically punishes the habit of stopping to explain. In the earliest days, this tradeoff seems harmless. A founding team of five can make a decision in a Slack thread or over coffee, and everyone knows enough of the context that no one feels left out. The explanation is baked into the relationships.
As the company grows, that implicit context stops scaling. New people arrive who weren’t in the old rooms. Early decisions that were meant as temporary hacks harden into default policies. A pricing choice made under duress, a remote‑work policy improvised during the pandemic, a quick call on when and how to use AI in the product—all of them can get promoted over time from “we did this once for a reason” to “this is just how we do things here.”
From the founder or early executive’s point of view, these decisions still feel self‑explanatory. They remember the customer conversation that forced the discount, the board meeting that compressed timelines, the legal advice that pushed them toward a certain stance. But as layers of management appear, those stories get shorter and more selective. By the time a decision reaches a new hire two or three levels away, it might be reduced to a line in a Notion doc or a sentence in a kickoff meeting.
Recent years have multiplied opportunities for this pattern to show up. Many companies are still running on half‑documented remote and hybrid policies first drafted in 2020, updated piecemeal as leases were signed or sublet. Layoff criteria that were hammered out under intense time pressure in 2023 became baked into how performance risk is discussed in 2024 and 2025. AI usage guidelines, pulled together quickly in response to legal and security concerns, now quietly shape which teams feel empowered to experiment and which feel constrained.
Inside these organizations, speed still feels virtuous. Decisions are being made. OKRs are being updated. Roadmaps are being re‑prioritized. Yet to people who weren’t there at the beginning, the logic behind those moves can feel opaque. A product manager might experience a leadership decision as arbitrary or unfair not because they disagree on the merits, but because they haven’t been given the context that led to it.
This is how founder logic becomes opaque without founders realizing it. A decision that once felt obvious now feels like a black box. A shortcut that saved the company in a crunch becomes doctrine. A policy that was meant to be revisited once conditions improved is treated as permanent simply because no one ever had time to write down the conditions.
The friction that follows looks like disagreement, but often it’s something else. Employees ask, implicitly or explicitly, “Why did we do it this way?” and get answers that sound like, “Because that’s how it is.” In response, they start to build their own narratives: the exec team doesn’t care, finance is overly conservative, legal is blocking innovation, the founders are stuck in the past. Once those narratives take hold, each new decision gets filtered through them.
Meanwhile, external forces keep jamming more change into the system. A slower IPO market forces boards to think differently about runway. Secondary programs at companies like Stripe and others create new expectations around liquidity and who gets access to it. Compensation data showing rising AI salaries pushes some teams to move quickly on pay while others are told there’s “no budget.” Every one of those shifts adds more complexity to decisions. Every one of them makes clear explanation more valuable and less likely to happen.
Speed and clarity are not enemies, but they draw from different muscles. Speed scales effort: if you double the number of things you do, you can often get more done even if each one is slightly worse explained. Clarity scales understanding: it requires pausing long enough to narrate not just what you decided, but why it might change and how people should interpret it when it does.
Leaders often underestimate how hungry people are for that narration. When they finally do sit down to write a long internal memo about strategy, compensation philosophy, or return‑to‑office decisions, those documents tend to be widely read and heavily bookmarked. The appetite was there the whole time. It was just competing with a culture that sees writing and explanation as a drag on velocity rather than a tool for keeping everyone able to move together.
None of this means every internal debate needs to be transcribed or that every decision needs a ten‑page brief. It does mean that for decisions that touch ownership, compensation, and power—who gets equity, who gets promoted, who gets to work from where—it is rarely a waste of time to write down the reasoning while it’s still fresh. That’s especially true in an era when departures, screenshots, and leaked all‑hands clips can quickly turn internal confusion into external narrative.
Speed will always be part of startup DNA. The question isn’t whether to move fast. It’s whether you’re willing to slow down just enough, in the right places, to make sure people understand what they’re being asked to move fast toward.
