The biggest determinant for startup success

Sriram Krishnan recently wrote a quick blog about the biggest determinant for success in a technology company where he argues:

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.

I would agree that “clock speed” us hard to measure from the outside. Here are a few ways I try to measure it when we assess startups:

When we dive in on their idea / startup with founders, one way I measure “clock speed” throughout the diligence process is email response times.

As basic as it may sound, many of the busiest and highest output individuals I know also have the shortest email response times. As a result, I draw a strong correlation between responding to an email within a reasonable timeframe (~4-6 hours or less is what I consider a good window depending on when the message was sent) and that individual’s “clock speed”.

That said, it’s important to qualify what I mean by a response. Focus is a super power and being able to put 100% of your brain capacity and attention towards the task in front of you is often needed for a great result. This is in direct conflict with email response times, especially if a good response requires deeper thinking.

However, you don’t need to always give the full answer to a complex email right then and there. Simply responding with a quick “Got it, will get back to you soon” goes a long way. It establishes trust, puts the sender’s mind at ease, manages expectations and implies high output velocity / “clock speed”.

To walk the talk - while I have the email notifications on my phone / computer turned off to be able to do focused work - I scan my inbox roughly once an hour to see if there are any emails that require me to respond fast. The rest I tend to ignore outside of the “inbox” time blocker I have in my calendar typically twice day.

As said, this sounds very basic yet it’s surprising how so many high output individuals do this consistently while many others don’t.

Another way to measure “clock speed” is the one Sriram outlines in his blog post:

When someone says “Let’s have a follow up conversation”, what is the implicit unspoken understanding of when that should happen?

Here’s the full post.

Until next week,

Pascal

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