Why Startups Must Unship to Stay Extraordinary

24 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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1:02

In this brief conversation, Eric Siu argues that startups, unlike large corporations, have limited resources and must therefore be hyper‑focused. He emphasizes the practice of "unshipping"—shutting down or removing features quickly—to avoid spreading effort thin in a world where anything can be shipped. Siu shares a recent experience of consolidating his own products to concentrate on a core memory engine used by many developers and enterprises. He notes that their "company brain" product created a conflict of interest with larger client companies such as Cognition and Notion, risking loss of revenue. This conflict highlighted that dividing attention across multiple initiatives leads to average results, whereas dedicating 100% of time to a single effort can produce extraordinary outcomes. The overall message is that to achieve extraordinary success, startups must make extraordinary decisions, including aggressive unshipping and focused product consolidation.

When you're a startup, you have less barrels than a large company. And so you have to be even more focused than before, and you have to focus on unshipping things and shutting things down quicker because we're in a world now where you can ship anything.
And we're also seeing people just ship too much stuff that just makes products harder to use.
And this is— this resonated with me because recently we had consolidated a few of our products and our initiatives just to focus in even more. We have many, many developers, startups, and enterprises who already use our memory engine in production. So they're using their core product, right? And so what ended up happening was that You know, this, this, uh, company brain thing that they were building ended up having a conflict of interest with large, larger companies that they work with, like Cognition or Notion, which are hot startups right now. And so you don't want to have conflict of interest with, with these clients and because eventually they're going to stop paying you. We want to make sure that everything we do, we're doing, we're the best at doing. Using some other company brain products and agent harnesses made me realize that putting 100% of your time in something can lead to great results. And since we are not able to do that, our product was average, not out of the ordinary. So if you want to be extraordinary, you have to do extraordinary things, which means unshipping.