Mayank Sisodia understands a pressure that almost every startup eventually faces: the pressure to move fast. In a young company, urgency can easily become part of the culture. Messages arrive with “we need this fast,” decisions are made within hours, launches are pushed forward, and problems are expected to disappear overnight. Mayank Sisodia’s reflection challenges the assumption that speed is automatically a sign of progress.
Startups are built around movement. There are limited resources, incomplete information, changing customer expectations, and competitors that may be moving just as quickly. In such an environment, waiting can feel dangerous. A founder may believe that every delay creates risk. Teams can begin measuring productivity by how quickly something gets completed rather than by whether it was completed correctly.
Mayank Sisodia points toward an important distinction: urgency and importance are not always the same thing.
A fast decision can absolutely be valuable. When a customer-facing problem needs immediate attention, when an opportunity has a narrow window, or when a business is losing money because of a broken process, acting quickly can protect the company. Speed can create momentum when it is directed toward the right problem.
The difficulty begins when speed becomes the default response to everything.
Mayank Sisodia highlights what happens when people gradually stop asking, “What is the right answer?” and begin asking, “What is the fastest answer?” Those questions may sound similar, but they lead to very different outcomes. The first considers consequences. The second focuses primarily on immediate completion.
That difference becomes significant as a company grows.
A rushed product decision may solve an immediate customer complaint but introduce a quality problem later. A hurried hiring decision may fill an open position quickly while creating months of management challenges. An operational shortcut may save a few hours today but force an entire team to compensate for it repeatedly in the future.
Mayank Sisodia’s observation about rework is especially relevant because rework is one of the hidden costs of excessive urgency. It rarely appears when the original decision is made. The immediate result looks productive: the task is finished, the deadline is met, and everyone moves on. The cost appears later through corrections, repeated discussions, customer complaints, process changes, or additional work.
This is why speed needs to be considered in terms of what it creates afterward.
Moving quickly on something important can build momentum. Moving quickly on everything can simply move problems further down the road.
For founders and startup teams, this creates a difficult leadership challenge. There is always another message, another deadline, another customer request, another operational issue, or another opportunity demanding attention. Mayank Sisodia’s perspective suggests that leadership is not only about creating urgency. It is also about recognizing when urgency is unnecessary.
That requires judgment.
Some decisions are reversible. If a small experiment fails, the team can learn and try again. Other decisions are expensive to reverse. Hiring key people, changing fundamental processes, making major product commitments, or establishing systems that hundreds of employees will depend on deserve greater consideration.
The ability to distinguish between these situations can be more valuable than simply becoming faster.
Mayank Sisodia’s idea also raises a broader question about startup culture: what behaviors does urgency reward? If employees constantly see speed being praised, they may naturally optimize for speed. They may send incomplete work because finishing quickly is rewarded. They may avoid raising concerns because questioning a rushed decision feels like slowing the team down. Eventually, the organization can become efficient at producing work without becoming better at producing outcomes.
That is where thoughtful leadership matters.
Mayank Sisodia does not argue against speed. Instead, his message points toward a more useful definition of speed: speed should create progress that lasts. A decision that saves one day but creates three weeks of additional work is not necessarily fast in any meaningful sense. A launch that happens early but damages customer trust may not represent progress either.
The goal, therefore, is not to eliminate urgency. It is to make urgency intentional.
There is also a personal lesson for people working inside startups. Not every request needs an immediate response simply because it is labeled urgent. Sometimes the responsible action is to ask another question, examine the consequences, gather more information, or take another day before committing. That pause may initially feel unproductive, but it can prevent much larger problems.
Mayank Sisodia’s reflection ultimately brings attention to a principle that applies far beyond startups: doing something quickly and doing something well are not automatically competing goals, but they are not automatically the same goal either.
Some moments demand speed. Some demand patience. Some require experimentation. Others require careful thinking because the cost of getting them wrong is high.
The real advantage comes from knowing the difference.
Mayank Sisodia’s message is therefore less about slowing down and more about becoming deliberate. A strong organization does not measure every decision by how quickly it was made. It considers whether the decision solved the right problem, whether the solution can hold up over time, and whether today’s action makes tomorrow easier or harder.
In a startup, speed will always matter. But Mayank Sisodia’s insight is that speed becomes meaningful only when it compounds. The objective is not to move faster simply to feel productive. It is to move with enough urgency to capture opportunities while having enough discipline to get important things right.
Because sometimes the most productive decision a team can make is not to hurry.
Sometimes, it is to think.
