Jason M. Lemkin recounts pushing his team to launch a product too early—he wanted three or four iterations and estimated ~24 months to get it right, but released after six months and calls that a mistake. He links product-iteration cadence to team quality and warns about "zombie" startups that, after raising at high valuations, have effectively infinite runway despite stalled growth.
And I pushed the team really hard to launch too early. It was a mistake. We still launched too early. But I knew we would run out of iterations. I knew our initial launch was not going to be the right product. No. I wanted three or four iterations, and I knew I had about 24 months total of time to do it right. So I shoved our product out the door after six months. Might kill me. It was a mistake. So the better the team is, the more of those iterations you get. And it's just. It's wonderful when you see it happen because they. They just have this leg up. I've invested in none of them, so I can't tell you empirically. I'm very concerned. Do worry about zombies. Zombies are the ones that took advantage of a valuation last year. Now they have Infinite Runway. They have Runway Forever. And. And when you get an investor update is, you know, good. Bad news is we're not growing, Harry. Our growth has dropped from 150% to 0%. The good news is we have 10 years of Runway.
