‘Move fast and break things’ has become the unthinking mantra of the tech industry.

There is certainly a time for moving quickly and decisively, accepting the associated risks.

Most of the time however, thinking and observing first, while working steadily and carefully husbanding resources is the way to go. (Thinking, of course, being much out of fashion at the present time.)

In a startup, this is doubly so. It’s one thing if you have vast staff and squillions of dollars to fling at something like the Metaverse.

If however, you have a small seed round, it doesn’t make so much sense.

VC’s don’t mind seeing 90% of initiatives fail, but if it’s your startup, then you just have so much money and emotional energy to invest.

Your first shot at a product or service will almost certainly miss, and unless you have the money and energy left to pivot after a first attempt, you will be toast. Once the stars align and product, market, and timing all come together, you can step on the gas, to thoroughly mix metaphors.

Somehow, in the last few years, the word ‘disruptive’ acquired a positive, not negative meaning. It’s largely been used to cover business models like Uber or WeWork, which explicitly involved underpricing an entire industry for years with the goal of eliminating all competition and then being able to milk the market at will.

It’s time to reverse that. What we need are more people and companies fixing things.

Amazon/Uber tactics are pretty hostile to sane companies. However, I think the kind of money needed to make these kind of plays is drying up. Much of this dates back to the 2008 crash, where historically low interest rates made it attractive to throw huge amounts of money at the wall. I think/hope those days are gone.

Also, any of these cute memes, followed without sufficient thought, will lead to disaster. The real issue is the cargo culting of strategies used by supposedly ‘genius’ founders in Silicon Valley. These guys are really just the ones who got lucky, but we, and they, are too dumb to realise it.