Pace

The most undervalued trait in startup hiring is pace. This is especially true today, when the floor is lava. Models that were state-of-the-art six months ago are now commodities. Code generation companies are fighting weekly battles for performance gains and feature advantages that can determine market leadership.

I've watched applied AI teams with modest funding outpace 100X better resourced competitors simply because they could complete thought-to-deployment cycles in days rather than weeks. When hiring, identifying these high-velocity people is worth more than almost any other qualification.

How to Recognize It

Pace isn't about long hours or grind. It doesn't obviously show up through a scan of a resume. It's about how quickly someone naturally moves through problems. The best people have an instinct for where to be meticulous and where to be quick—obsessing over the critical 20% that determines success while being efficient with the rest.

Pace isn't even about ownership—plenty of people own projects or responsibilities but move through them deliberately. You can have deep ownership and poor pace. The most valuable team members combine both: taking full responsibility while maintaining velocity.

Prioritization is necessary for pace. In startups, there's always too much to do. This isn't temporary; it's the natural state of building something ambitious with limited resources. People who thrive don't get paralyzed by this volume. They quickly determine what needs attention now versus what can wait.

Do They Ship?

You can recognize these people.

They finish things. Their history shows completion—not necessarily successful features and products, but finished ones. They often leave behind a trail of side projects.

Their questions cut to the core. They identify what actually matters.

They deliver quickly. Give them a test project or work trial, and they'll return with something impressive sooner than expected, and ramp to be productive when others won't.

They often have momentum in the recruiting process. They're trying to get to an outcome -- the best one for them, vs. waiting for you to make a decision.

Their behavior tells a story. Look at commit patterns—people shipping regularly at 11pm on Sundays have different pace DNA than 9-to-5 folks.

How does a sales leader interact with customers and reps? Are they trying to break through the natural cycle, doing 7a standup, always moving the ball forward, or are they overwhelmed? How seriously do they take the end of quarter, vs. making excuses about why a deal pushed?

They are creative when asked to go faster. One of my favorite interview questions comes from Keller at Zipline. For a hardware company, pace (and related, efficiency) is the difference between life and death. They'll explain a technical challenge to a candidate, ask them to talk through how they'd approach it. Then they ask them to think through how they'd do it again -- but in half the time.

The Big Company Trap

Some talented people struggle in startups because they're accustomed to specialized roles and support systems, and critically, a slower pace. Big companies don't face the threat of dying every day.

These people who operate more slowly are recognizable when they join you. They try to recreate structures, are doing months of "pre work" and "organization building" before they do work that has impact, and they stall while waiting for direction.

High-pace people adapt to constraints and find ways to move forward regardless. "What did you get done this week?" is in fact, a totally fair question.

When Fast People Work Together

Pace is infectious. Fast people energize each other and develop shared intuition about priorities. I've watched small teams ship quickly, get user feedback, incorporate it rapidly, and build momentum that seemed almost unstoppable. Group norms are strong, and team oriented folks never want to be the bottleneck. Slow people frustrate fast people.

Fighting Organizational Gravity

As organizations expand, they naturally slow down. The question becomes: which structures preserve velocity while reinforcing good judgment?

Your org chart either accelerates or impedes your velocity. Conway's Law inevitably shapes output—teams structured for pace will produce systems designed for pace.

It helps to constantly ask: "What's our biggest speed constraint right now?" and debug it. Addressing these directly often yields surprising results.

Speed Starts at the Top

Founders who can't make decisions quickly create organizational molasses. I've seen brilliant teams rendered immobile by leaders who need excessive data or consensus before acting.

Pace flows from the top. When leaders demonstrate comfort with imperfect information and rapid decision-making, it cascades through the organization. The reverse is equally true—hesitant leadership breeds hesitant teams.

Comfort with Being Wrong

Pace isn't just about actions but conviction under uncertainty. The highest-pace people have profound comfort with ambiguity—they're willing to be wrong 40% of the time to be right faster than someone who needs 95% certainty.

This mindset is particularly crucial in emerging technologies where perfect information simply doesn't exist. The instinct for one-way vs. two-way doors, the willingness to make high-quality decisions with incomplete data separates companies that lead from those that follow.

When Speed Beats Quality

Quality and polish are beloved in software. They are romanticized as elements of good taste and expressions of great technical teams. But they are more critical in more mature markets.

In immature markets of high uncertainty, speed compounds. When breakthroughs happen weekly rather than yearly, pace isn't just a competitive advantage—it's existential.

But here's the critical caveat: pace is the dominant trait only under two conditions -- you have a North Star. Before or after product market fit, speed without direction is just chaos. The most successful teams have a clear, unwavering general sense of where they're headed—a compelling ten-year vision that serves as a decision-making filter throughout the organization. With that North Star established, velocity becomes your superpower. Without it, you're just moving fast in circles.

When founders are frustrated with pace, it could be the lack of high-pace "drivers" in the organization or structures that are slowing them down. Just as often, it is lack of clarity.