Goooooood morning World! 👋
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Yesterday evening, I was invited by Le Wagon Brussels to tell the story of Flora Insurance during one of their Talks.
You can watch the replay here.
I really enjoyed the experience and the format: I was interviewed live by one of their student + the audience could ask questions at the end.
All questions were excellent. I hope my answers were too 🤞
One of them gave me the idea for the subject of this issue: the value of speed for startups.
Speed is a new currency. Speed is an an unfair advantage.
There are many differences between traditional players and startups.
I listed them in this infographic 👇
Speed, fast decision making is certainly the difference with the most impact.
Most of the time, you make small or big decisions based on data. But you can never have all data. So, you need to rely a minimum on intuition, feeling.
So, it’s impossible to be 100% sure a decision you’re making is a good decision.
Don’t loose time looking for impossible to gather data during weeks or months before making a decision.
The sooner you make a decision, the sooner you’ll know if you were right or wrong.
As soon a you have a sense of feeling about what the right decision is, make it.
You could still pivot afterwards if needed.
You need a test and learn mindset.
My advise: Rely on rapid learning to make progresses. 🚀
Incumbents take a lot of time before making decisions.
Why?
Big companies think they cannot afford to be wrong.
They think the full scope of their apps should be delivered and perfect and before being brought out to the world.
They don’t want to hurt their brand/reputation.
Start-ups can beat them by being faster. Because…
They’re not afraid to fail.
They think MVP.
They’re building their brand. They don’t care about their reputation. They have no reputation. 🤓
Anyway, they need to go faster, otherwise they would soon be running out of cash. 💶
Disclaimer
Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup: How constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses, defines a startup as follow
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Traditional players can act like start-ups. 😱
Flora Insurance proves it.
Ethias gave us all the freedom, autonomy and resources we needed to act like one.
That’s what I explained yesterday evening.
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