On Time and the Pace of Progress

I often catch myself in a strange reflection: we watch our children grow, yet it feels like we have to recalibrate our sense of their maturity every single day. One moment you see decisions, character, ambition — and you expect adult behavior. A minute later you remind yourself: wait, he’s only eleven — he is still a child. And again comes this search for the right boundary: when to let go and when to demand more? When to give freedom and lower expectations, and when to hold the line? How do you respect growth without overloading a child with premature expectations?

Business is the same—especially in startups. We are always racing against the market and against time. You need to run fast so you don’t wake up one day and find your idea at the back of the peloton. Inside, a voice constantly pushes: faster. Even faster. In your head, a task takes one week. The team says three. A month goes by, and it still feels agonizingly slow. Yet, in reality, a lot is moving—just not at the speed you imagined. Again, you have to recalibrate your sense of time: what is a real constraint, and what is just inertia? In the AI era, this gets amplified by FOMO: “Build an MVP in six hours,” “Ship features overnight” — the new narrative (though reality rarely matches the slogan — tested personally).

Then there’s another layer: the difference in horizons. Someone once told me: “Your time horizon is far ahead. Your shareholders’ is closer. Your team’s is much shorter.” That’s where friction appears—different scales, different speeds, different expectations. Rhythm breaks. Misalignment follows.

And it seems that one of the key jobs of a founder and CEO is learning to work with time: your own, your team’s, your investors’, your market’s. To tune the system so it moves forward without burning out. To accelerate without breaking. To synchronize tempo without squeezing people dry. To keep momentum without descending into chaos.

Maturity, in many ways, is about your relationship with time. In parenting — not rushing life. In business — not fantasizing about impossible speed a team cannot sustain. In leadership — setting a rhythm that drives progress without destroying people. It’s about sensing proportionality: yourself to the market, your team to the challenge, your product to the moment.