Akeel JabberInvestment Director, Horizen Capital · Investor, Entrepreneur and Petroleum Engineer

Is patience or impatience killing your startup’s progress?

16 Apr 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:43

In this segment, the speaker discusses the dual nature of impatience for startup founders, distinguishing between constructive urgency and harmful haste. He warns that excessive impatience often leads to premature pivots—changing direction every few months—causing startups to lose momentum and reset progress toward product‑market fit. By contrast, patient founders who stay focused on a single vision can eventually achieve product‑market fit, even if it takes longer than expected. The speaker emphasizes that pivoting before a clear product‑market fit is found can erase hard‑won insights and send the venture back to square one, potentially missing the right path altogether.

Chapters

And so I think really the patience, and I think there's good impatience, but there's also impatience that can be detrimental. And so, you know, if you're detrimental, impatience might be, you know, pivoting too quickly. And I see some startups that shut down and they're pivoting every 2 months when it's clear you'll see other companies with some of those same concepts actually stay focused and patient and you'll see them eventually take off. And, you know, I think in the experience that I've had in my career of finding product market fit, It often takes longer than you think, and if you pivot while you're making progress, but maybe before you're able to really achieve product market fit, then you start back at where you started, which is zero, and you might have actually been down a path that could have been one that was the right path.