Latency Beats Velocity

Ravi Mehta spent years leading product at big companies like Facebook and Tinder before starting his own company. The biggest surprise? Startups aren't actually faster.

'Things felt slower when I started my own company because I didn't have as many engineers... The advantage a smaller company has really is in latency.'

Velocity is how much you get done. Latency is how fast you can go from idea to learning whether the idea works.

Big companies have high velocity - they ship tons of stuff. But they have terrible latency - it takes months to know if any of it worked. Startups ship less but learn faster.

This reframes parenting completely.

Stop trying to do more things (velocity). Start trying to learn faster whether what you're doing is working (latency).

That new bedtime approach? Don't try it for three weeks before evaluating. Try it twice and pay close attention. What happened? Did it help? Did it make things worse?

Ravi's test: 'If there's a really simple change you want to make, how long does it take to go from we think this change is worth making to actually getting results?'

Shorten that cycle. Try something. Notice what happens. Adjust. Don't wait for perfect data. Fast learning beats fast doing every time.