I spent our first two years running on the assumption that speed was the whole game. More clients, more hires, more everything, faster. The data I found this year confirms what I only started believing after it nearly cost us something real: the founders sprinting hardest aren't the ones still standing at the finish line.
Everyone told me to move faster
Every piece of advice I got in our first eighteen months said the same thing. Grow the roster. Take every client. Say yes before you’ve thought it through, because somebody else will say yes if you don’t. I believed it, mostly because I didn’t have proof that the opposite worked, just a gut feeling that we were about to build something we’d resent.
I’m not writing this because I figured it out early. I’m writing it because the data caught up to the gut feeling, and now I have numbers instead of just an instinct to point to.
The data doesn’t reward the sprint
Sifted surveyed 138 startup founders in 2025 about their mental health. Fifty-four percent had experienced burnout in the past year. Eighty-three percent reported high stress. Sixty-seven percent were working more than fifty hours a week. Fifty-four percent had trouble sleeping. Only six percent reported no mental health challenges at all.
Here’s the part that should change how founders actually run their companies, not just how they feel about running them. Gallup studied 143 CEOs from the Inc. 500’s list of America’s fastest-growing private companies and split them by delegation talent. The CEOs who scored high on delegation posted an average three-year revenue growth rate of 1,751 percent, 112 percentage points higher than the CEOs with limited delegation ability. High-delegating CEOs generated 33 percent more revenue on average and created more jobs over the same period. The founders who built systems other people could run outperformed the founders trying to run everything themselves.
Slowing down, in other words, isn’t the sacrifice everyone frames it as. Refusing to build a company that depends entirely on you moving at top speed forever is the actual growth strategy.
What Motto’s co-founders taught me about the pace of real work
Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger, co-founders of the brand strategy firm Motto, put language to something I’d been circling for months without naming it. Discussing how leaders should plan through uncertain periods, they said the answer isn’t picking between the long view and the short sprint. It’s holding both at once.
“Start thinking in quarters. You’ll find that you’re able to effectively have the big picture as a goal, but also be nimble enough to adapt to shorter sprints.”
Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger, Co-Founders, Motto
That reframed the whole question for me. The choice was never speed versus patience. It was whether the pace we were running at was one we’d actually chosen, or one we’d inherited from every founder who told us to hurry.
What slowing down actually looked like here
It looked like turning down a client whose brief didn’t match what we actually do well, instead of stretching the team thin to say yes. It looked like taking longer to make our second and third senior hires than felt comfortable, because getting them wrong would have cost us more than the delay did. It looked like building the Code of 24 before we scaled past a size where nobody remembered why we made a decision in the first place.
None of that felt like winning in the moment. Every one of those calls has held up.
“The founders who burn brightest under pressure usually aren’t the ones building something that outlasts them. The ones who build something that lasts are the ones who decided, on purpose, what they weren’t going to rush.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
