My Longest, Most Complicated Relationship

There’s a moment, just before you tip the bike into a corner at over 100 mph, when the world both expands and collapses. It expands into a wide-angle blur of asphalt, curb, and sky. And it collapses into a single point of focus: the apex, that mathematically perfect spot you need to hit to survive the turn and accelerate out of it. Your brain is screaming calculations your body has to execute in fractions of a second. The engine is a physical roar in your chest. The wind is trying to peel you off the machine. In that moment, there is no past, no future. There is only the raw, visceral now.

This is the world of speed. It’s been “complicated” for a while, as I dabbled in surfing, snowboarding, racing cars, bicycles, I’m even told I sew too fast. I’ve always enjoyed speed but it got serious with motorcycles, and now, it’s become so much more. Speed isn’t just a hobby; it’s my longest and maybe most toxic relationship. It’s a demanding partner. It asks for everything—total commitment, unwavering focus, a willingness to dance right on the edge of disaster. It has bruised me, broken bones, put me in a comma, and left me questioning my sanity more times than I can count. It’s a relationship built on a foundation of near-misses and brutal feedback. And yet, I’m not leaving it. I can’t.

Because this complicated, all-consuming relationship with speed, with all its painful lessons, has been the single most influential teacher in my life and in my work at Spade Design. It’s the ‘why’ behind how I build brands and the ‘how’ behind the advice I give to every founder brave enough to start their own journey. The lessons learned in the controlled chaos of the racetrack provide a blueprint for navigating the equally chaotic world of entrepreneurship. It all comes down to one simple, brutal truth: the faster you go, the faster you fail. And in business, as on the track, the one who learns the fastest, wins.

The Beautiful Brutality of Failure: Why Crashing is Learning

On the track, failure is not an abstract concept. It’s a high-side crash that sends you tumbling across the asphalt, a misjudged corner that leaves you in the gravel trap, or an engine that gives out at the worst possible moment. I’ve had my share of these moments. I remember one crash vividly—the sickening feeling of losing traction, the violent separation from the bike, and the long, painful slide. In the seconds after, lying there with the smell of hot metal and gasoline in the air, your first thought isn’t about the race. It’s an instant, raw audit of what just happened.

Too much throttle, too early. Wrong line. I wasn’t looking far enough ahead. A crash is the most abrupt and undeniable feedback loop imaginable. It’s not a critique you can ignore or a memo you can file away. It’s a data point delivered with the force of a physical impact.

This is the heart of the “fail fast” philosophy that became a mantra in the startup world. The idea is to quickly test and refine ideas to gain insights from mistakes, rather than dedicating excessive time and resources to perfecting them before launch. It’s about accepting that failure is not just possible, but a valuable part of the process. However, the business world has begun to see the limits of this mantra. Too often, “fail fast” becomes an excuse for recklessness, a corporate bromide that leaders preach but don’t practice, creating a culture of fear where failure is punished despite what the posters on the wall say. Failure without learning is just… failure.

That’s why the conversation has evolved from “failing fast” to “learning fast”. This is a crucial distinction. Learning fast isn’t about seeking failure; it’s about being purposeful in your experimentation. It requires designing initiatives to ensure learning, not just hoping that a crash leads to an epiphany. This is the difference between a novice joyrider who crashes and a professional race team that pushes a bike to its limits during a test session. The professional team isn’t just “failing”; they are methodically gathering data from every lap, every adjustment, every near-failure. They create an environment of psychological safety where the rider (the founder) can report back honestly about what’s working and what isn’t, without fear of blame. They form a hypothesis—”If we adjust the suspension, we can carry more speed through Turn 3″—and then they run the experiment to validate it.

Embracing this is hard because it runs counter to our deepest instincts. We are conditioned to avoid failure. Perfectionism, at its core, is often a fear-driven motivation, a shield against judgment and criticism. But on the racetrack, you learn a more potent lesson: hesitation is more dangerous than commitment. The moment you doubt your line or second-guess your braking point is the moment you lose control. You have to commit to the action, fully aware of the risk, because that is the only path forward. This commitment to action, even when the outcome is uncertain, is what a “learn fast” culture is all about. It’s about building a system for learning, not just enduring accidents.

The Minimum Viable Machine: Your First Lap is Not Your Fastest

This philosophy of learning through action naturally leads to a critical tool for any founder: the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. The concept, first popularized by Eric Ries, is defined as “that version of a new product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort”.

Think about it in terms of the racetrack. When a race team develops a new bike, they don’t show up on day one with the final, million-dollar, perfectly painted machine. They show up with a prototype. It might have unpainted carbon fiber fairings, exposed wires, and a raw, unfinished look. It’s not the final product, but it is a Minimum Viable Machine. Its purpose is not to win the race or even to look good. Its purpose is singular: to get on the track and start generating data. Is the frame geometry stable? Does the engine deliver power smoothly? How do the tires wear? This first version is a tool for learning.

This is precisely what an MVP is in business. It is not a cheap or half-baked version of your final product. It is a strategic experiment designed to test your most critical business hypothesis. The word “Viable” is just as important as “Minimum.” The product has to be functional enough to actually solve a core problem for a user and provide a reliable test. But it should be stripped of every feature that doesn’t directly contribute to testing that core hypothesis. As LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman famously said, “if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”.

The history of successful startups is littered with brilliant examples of this principle in action:

• Dropbox: Before building a complex and expensive file-syncing infrastructure, the founders simply created a 3-minute explainer video demonstrating how the product would work. They put it online to see if anyone cared. The number of signups exploded overnight, validating their core hypothesis that people desperately wanted this solution, all without a single line of production code being written.

• Zappos: In 1999, founder Nick Swinmurn wanted to test the hypothesis that customers were ready to buy shoes online. Instead of investing in inventory and a warehouse, he went to local shoe stores, took pictures of their shoes, and posted them on a simple website. When an order came in, he would go to the store, buy the shoes at full retail price, and ship them to the customer himself. He lost money on every sale, but he gained something far more valuable: validated learning that his idea had a market.

• Uber: The first version, “UberCab,” was a simple SMS-based service for a small group of users in San Francisco. It connected riders with a few black cars and handled payment. It was a far cry from the global logistics platform it is today, but it was enough to prove the fundamental concept: people would use their phones to summon a ride.

In each case, the founders resisted the urge to build the perfect, all-encompassing solution from day one. They built a Minimum Viable Machine, took it for a shakedown lap, and listened intently to the feedback from the “track”—the market. They focused on learning what customers actually do, which is infinitely more reliable than asking them what they would do. This approach saves invaluable time and money, preventing you from investing years and a fortune into building a beautiful machine that nobody wants to drive.

Execution is Horsepower: The Paralysis of the Perfect Plan

In racing, you can have the most brilliant strategy, the most aerodynamic bike, and the most talented rider, but if you don’t have horsepower, you will lose. Execution is the horsepower of business. It’s the raw power that turns a plan into reality. Speed of execution is the ability to implement ideas and decisions quickly and efficiently, and it is one of the most critical factors in startup success. It allows a new venture to outpace larger, more cumbersome competitors, adapt to sudden market shifts, and, most importantly, accelerate the learning cycle we’ve been talking about. The faster you execute, the faster you get feedback, the faster you learn, and the faster you improve.

So what kills this vital horsepower? What grinds the engine of execution to a halt? It’s the twin demons that haunt every creator and entrepreneur: perfectionism and procrastination.

They are two sides of the same coin. Perfectionism, in a business context, is rarely about a healthy drive for excellence. It’s a paralyzing fear of failure, a deep-seated belief that anything less than flawless will result in judgment and criticism. This fear manifests in destructive ways: micromanaging everything, being unable to delegate because “no one can do it as well as I can,” and endlessly tinkering with a product instead of shipping it. Procrastination is the natural outcome of this fear. It’s not laziness; it’s a defense mechanism. We delay starting a task because we are terrified of not being able to complete it perfectly. As the saying goes, “Perfectionism is procrastination dressed up as conscientiousness”.

This paralysis of the perfect plan is not just a frustrating habit; it is an existential threat to a startup. The statistics are sobering. Up to 90% of startups fail. The number one reason, cited in 42% of cases, is misreading market demand—or, more simply, no market need. This is a failure of learning, a direct consequence of not executing fast enough to test your assumptions in the real world. The second biggest reason for failure, at 29%, is running out of cash. Every day spent perfecting a plan in a vacuum instead of launching an MVP and generating feedback (or even revenue) is a day you are burning through your most precious resource. Procrastination has a quantifiable cost, estimated at over $10,000 per employee per year in lost productivity. For a founder, that cost is magnified exponentially.

This is where the racer’s mindset becomes a powerful antidote. On the track, you cannot procrastinate. A decision to brake or turn must be made now. You have to commit, even with imperfect information, because inaction is the most dangerous choice of all. The mantra is “done is better than perfect”. A finished lap, even a slow or sloppy one, gives you data. A theoretically perfect lap that you’re still planning in the garage gives you nothing. It’s about progress over perfection, momentum over meditation. The following table illustrates the stark contrast between these two mindsets.

Choosing the racer’s approach means choosing action. It means valuing the lessons from a real-world lap over the fantasy of a perfect one. It means firing up the engine and leaving the garage, even if you’re not sure what the track has in store.

Finding the Common Thread: Weaving Speed into a Resilient Brand

When I started writing this journal, I framed my philosophy around four pillars that I believe underpin every resilient brand and successful founder: The Risk-Taker, The Maker, The Strategist, and The Humanist. It’s easy to see them as separate ideals, but my relationship with speed has taught me that they are an interconnected system, a virtuous cycle that, when running properly, builds unstoppable momentum. Speed is the fuel that makes the entire engine run.

It starts with The Risk-Taker. This is the willingness to get on the bike in the first place, to embrace the uncertainty and commit to the first lap. This act of courage generates the raw material for everything that follows: the data, the feedback, the failure.

That raw data is then handed to The Strategist. The strategist’s job is to deconstruct what happened on that lap. Why did we go wide in that corner? What does the data from the market tell us? The strategist analyzes the feedback from the crash, not with emotion, but with curiosity, turning failure into a set of actionable insights and forming a better plan for the next attempt.

That new plan goes to The Maker. The maker is the one who gets their hands dirty, who translates the strategist’s plan into a new reality. They build the next iteration, the improved prototype, the v2 of the MVP. The maker’s craft isn’t about a single, perfect creation; it’s about the process of iterative improvement, of building, testing, and rebuilding, each time getting closer to a flawless system.

And this entire loop is guided by The Humanist. The humanist reminds us why we’re on the track in the first place. We’re not just chasing speed for speed’s sake; we are trying to solve a real human problem. Getting a product to market faster means helping someone sooner. Listening to customer feedback and iterating quickly is the ultimate act of empathy—it shows you value their needs more than your own ego. It builds a connection based on responsiveness and respect.

When these four pillars work in concert, driven by the catalytic force of speed, they create a resilient brand. A brand built this way isn’t a fragile, perfect crystal, liable to shatter at the first sign of trouble. It’s more like a race-tuned machine—flexible, adaptable, and constantly being improved based on real-world performance. It’s forged in the fires of the market, not incubated in a sterile lab. This is the kind of durable, lasting brand we strive to help founders build at Spade—one that can not only withstand the bumps and crashes of the journey but actually get stronger because of them.

Why I’m Still in This Relationship

So, I come back to the beginning. My relationship with speed. Is it toxic? Maybe. It demands an unreasonable amount of attention. It has left me with scars, both physical and psychological. It constantly whispers that I’m not going fast enough.

But I’m not leaving. Because this relationship, for all its brutal demands, is what forges resilience. It’s what teaches focus. It’s what proves, time and again, that the biggest risk is not taking one. The lessons are too valuable, the growth too profound. It has taught me that progress isn’t a straight line; it’s a series of laps, each one a little faster, a little smoother than the last.

To the founder reading this, staring at your own starting line, feeling the fear of that first corner—I see you. My advice is to embrace your own relationship with speed. Get on the track. Don’t be afraid to crash. Don’t wait for the perfect conditions or the perfect machine. Understand that your goal isn’t to be perfect on the first lap. Your goal is to finish the lap, learn the lesson, and get back out there to do it again, only better.

The journey isn’t about avoiding failure. It’s about learning from it faster than anyone else. That is the common thread. That is the race worth winning.