I was just listening to John Collison’s marvelous podcast episode with Patrick O’Shaughnessy and had a thought I need to share with you.
Collison (along with his brother, Patrick) runs Stripe — a company whose mission is to “Increase the GDP of the Internet.”
At the 22-minute mark, O’Shaughnessy asks Collison about the difference between size and speed in companies and how the two are often at odds (as companies get bigger, they tend to move slower).
Collison’s response stood out to me:
“You constantly have to be testing yourself, checking yourself like the military runs the exercises. You need to be confident that you can really quickly roll out products. For two reasons. One is, there’s a business need to actually be able to do it, and oftentimes, in certain parts of our business, we are competing with startups. The second is that, I think employees find it much more enjoyable to work as a company that’s moving quickly rather than working for IBM. And so we really think about speed as a quality of life improvement of working at Stripe.”
Speed as a quality of life improvement.
I love that.
As I toyed with this idea in my head, I thought back to my 2 years in professional baseball.
I specifically remembered one time where I was given the opportunity to get some training to help our pitching department. I went away for the weekend, absorbed the content, and came back with a write-up of the most relevant things I had learned and how we could implement them.
I handed it to the decision makers, and prepared to go to work.
And then……..
nothing.
Well, maybe that’s not fair of me to say. There was something.
But that something was the news that this would probably need to wait until the 2021 season. There were too many pieces already in place, too many hurdles to climb over to get this thing ready for Day 1 of Spring Training.
Now, please don’t read this as a negative review of professional baseball (or sports). I understand that this is not everyone’s situation, nor does this bother others to the same degree it bothers me.
But I resonate with Collison’s point. Speed is a quality of life improvement.
And that’s one of the many reasons I’m excited about what we’re building at Tread Athletics.
Does this resonate with you? Are you looking for a place that values moving quickly?
Then maybe you’re the kind of person we want at Tread. Click here to find out for yourself.