Nearly a decade ago, a product manager told me about the phrase "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." It's a military motto that refers to how elite forces traverse ground and infiltrate enemy lines. The premise is that a deliberate and highly coordinated series of interconnected movements is significantly more effective and fast than an all-out storm the battlefield approach. While the former seems to move at a relatively slow clip, it is actually meaningfully faster than any alternative because of its meticulous movement.
This concept can be applied to doing things inside a company. Working with other people and being highly aligned and moving as one is a smooth way to do things. The coordination costs may be high, but the motion is smooth, and when you look back at the end of the day it's a hell of a lot faster than people flailing independently at warp speed.
Stylistically, it's also applicable at the individual level. My son is dyslexic, and he has a tendency to read through text as quickly as possible. This sometimes results in him reading a word like "turn" as "run" which can completely change the meaning of a sentence to the point it is nonsensical. The thing I tell him is that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. It's easier, more effective, and leads to better comprehension if you just take a beat as you flow through things. It's a really hard thing to do when we are wired to run.
Yesterday, I read an incredible article called AI 2027. I highly recommend taking your time and reading it. It goes through a variety of different scenarios about how the development and integration of AI into our world can and will unfold over the next several years. It reads like science fiction, and any prognostication of this sort has a tinge of fantasy, but it certainly feels quite real (Josh Wolfe likes to say sci-fi is becoming sci-fact and I believe that to be true at an accelerating rate). The outcomes range from utopian to armageddon, and the thing that determines where on that spectrum we end up is how deliberate we are along the way.
Every incentive right now encourages foundational AI companies to move fast. There are a slew of domestic competitors that are vying for AI supremacy and raising tens of billions of dollars to build the latest and greatest models. They range from incumbents to extraordinarily important startups filled with the world's best researchers. There is also a geopolitical force where China is moving at an alarmingly fast clip, too. The country with the most advanced AI is the country with the most influence and ability to align the rest of the world to its goals and values. The stakes could not be higher, so the incentive is to rush and "win the race."
But AI is non-deterministic. Nobody really knows what's going to come out of it when we put something into it. So alignment of AI with our goals as human beings is priority number one. Being right can mean a beautiful future where everyone is happy and prosperous and being off by one degree can mean sayonara human civilization. While every external force from capitalism to international relations to the innate human need to pioneer the frontier is pushing us to go, go, go, it is very much in our interest to take our time and do this right. In the long run, that will get us to where we want to go because slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
When you are building a startup some things are cyclical. One of the things that constantly cycles through is the idea that a visual rebrand will be the thing that helps you find the next S-curve and grow. I found myself there multiple times with groupme and fundera. It’s part of the laws of physics of startup building.
Almost all of the time this does not move the needle. What most every company needs is some brand design - a logo and marketing website - that’s good enough and a style guide for your application that will get the job done. Brand design does not determine whether you get to product market fit and whether there is demand for what you are building. What matters is building things with speed, ferocity, and focus and having an incredible product people love using. A pretty logo doesn’t help you do that.
Oftentimes, I see founders caught in the trap of looking at a competitor or company that they think has terrific visual design, and they say, “I need that.” So they go and try to find the best design agency out there, or the one the flashy company that just raised $100m used and get on a waiting list and pay $80k-$100k for a full 3 months long brand design work endeavor. Then they relaunch their brand and expect the world to shake and literally nothing happens. Time and money down the drain. But most importantly time and energy.
If you insist that terrific brand design is a must have then what you really need at the early stage is to work with someone competent who will charge you anywhere between $0 to $20k maximum for some brand design work that is good enough. This includes your marketing website along with a style guide you can use to build your product. Get it, implement it, put it behind you, and move on. Good enough is the name of the game for this stuff at the early stages.
People may read this hot take and think it’s blasphemous. Many believe that brand design and visual and stylistic taste are distinguishing factors for startups. But they are not for 99% of companies (and in my experience, the 1% know deep in their soul they are the 1% exception to the rule). Unless you are a creative genius and brand work and visual design is your superpower as a founder or deeply ingrained in your founding team, it’s not going to be a differentiator for you so get over it and just build something that solves a problem and that people want.
*Please note that brand design is fundamentally different than building a trusted brand. You must build a trusted brand to succeed, especially in the age of AI.
Two profound things are happening right now for entrepreneurs. First, AI is creating an entirely new set of capabilities for people to build new experiences and solve new problems. In the same way mobile and the cloud unlocked a new canvas for application developers, AI opens what is likely an even more vast universe of possibilities. Second, AI is changing how entrepreneurs build products and businesses. Both of these things combine to make this the most exciting moment in time to build things I've witnessed in my career.
Regarding the latter, I have been thinking a lot about what it means for a startup to be, for lack of better words, “AI-native.” AI-native startups are those that are born in the times when one can do more with meaningfully less people and resources, and embrace the cornucopia of AI tools that empower them to do this. From agents to co-pilots and automated workflows, the way we can build things today is vastly different than just several years ago.
I think of being ai-native as existing on a spectrum between automating everything possible with agents (eg we don’t have a marketer or customer support, we have agents that do those jobs and more) to everyone inside a company embracing tooling to make themselves more than twice as productive than they could have been just years ago.
Here is a good description of two ends of the spectrum as presented by two tweets:
I like these because they provide some explicit examples of what this can mean. I don't think there's one single definition for AI-native, it's a representative style of building companies. And it comes loaded with implications for the future of startups and innovation and the mindset founders assume when building things.
The mental shift is real amongst builders, and it is all about embracing doing more with less, faster. It used to be that a sign of "success" was “blitzscaling,” or rapidly hiring people and growing the size of a company to tackle an opportunity in a hot market. Entrepreneurs were fed endless money to pursue opportunities and hire, hire, hire. There is a reframing happening where this is no longer the sign of success. The ability to stay lean as long as possible and focus on building and shipping instead of hiring big teams is leading to a new ai-native operating model. It’s exciting: do more with less capital and less people. This, of course, is a threat to most VC models, which depend on deploying as much capital as quickly as possible. But builders shouldn't care about VC models when solving problems - they should care about solving the thing as quickly, effectively, and capital-efficiently as possible.
Here's an example of this mentality as expressed by the co-founder of Bountycaster, a two-person team that has gone far and fast:
Founders are capable of doing all sorts of jobs now. I cannot tell you how many experienced entrepreneurs I have spoken with who are so excited to try to build new things and not have to deal with "company building" and people management. The idea that you can now go exponentially further than ever before with a team of 10 people or less used to be the stuff of dreams. This sentiment is burrowing itself in the founder's psyche, particularly those building at the application layer, and it's becoming pervasive. That's a very good thing.
Another great thing about ai-native startups is that they have a structural advantage relative to pre-existing competitors. They are unencumbered by the ways people used to build things and can embrace AI tooling to endow every member of the team with superpowers. In this sense, they are operationally counter-positioned to incumbents in many ways. Incumbents are riddled with layers of management. Managers manage people and get things done through them. That is their profession, and they have no incentive to relinquish those responsibilities and compromise their career. For this reason, large companies will struggle with adopting tools that make them meaningfully more efficient, and their startup competitors will be born with them. This will manifest in their economics and ability to ship and move fast. And that is what matters when building new things.
Every day we are learning more about what it means to be AI-native, and entrepreneurs are unlocking new tools and ideas to push the envelope even further. We are particularly interested in this at USV and are hosting a demo day for founders to show how they build their companies in ai-native ways. If you have an insight you want to share or you want to attend you can reach out to us here on twitter or email me:
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It's a new day for founders, and it's incredibly exciting. Building a company will always be very hard, but building a product and a business has never been easier. A new golden age has commenced.