Learn to Move Fast

At our leadership offsite one of my executives said something I cannot shake. "The most important thing we can do is learn how to move fast."

He is right. Speed is the defining factor of this era.

Slow SaaS

I am bearish on slow SaaS. Slow companies are slow to change, and they are even slower to realize they must change. In a shift moving this fast, that delay compounds.

Companies that are only an interface on top of a database are in trouble. The deeper problem is the inability to disrupt yourself. Slow companies protect the way they already work instead of facing the new reality.

One quarter instead of four

I read a strong plan from one of our teams recently. It was 90% there. The thinking was new. The timeline was old. It assumed four quarters of work.

I told the team I thought we could go at least four times faster, maybe ten. Small, empowered teams with a very clear plan and focus. The response was better than I hoped. One senior developer can now own an initiative from end to end. Work that used to take a team a year can take one person a few sprints.

That is the speed available to every team now. Most plans have not caught up to it.

Build workers instead of buttons

The piece missing from most of our plans is simple. AI employee autonomy.

We have to stop building processes and tools for people to use. We need to build AI employees that do the work, managed by people the way any staff member is managed. The AI does the job. The human coaches and inspects it every day.

That is the test I am using. If we are building buttons for humans to click, we are moving too slowly. If we are building agents that do the work while we sleep, we are moving fast.

Slow down to speed up

Inertia is hard to break. A few people break out early. Many do not.

So we need to stop, right now, and learn how to move fast, even if it slows us down for a few weeks while we break old habits. This applies to the whole company. R&D, yes, and also sales, marketing, operations and people.

I will own the past. There were changes at Vendasta that took us more than a year. We were too slow to decide and too slow to execute. We do not have that kind of time anymore.

So I have put a date on it. Every leader defines what it means for their team to be AI first. Every person uses AI every day and shows real progress. Then we set the next milestone, and the one after that.

A binary year

I think 2026 has a binary outcome for software companies. They match the pace of AI, or they fall behind it.

We have the vision, the technology and the team. What we need now is leadership and execution fast enough to reach escape velocity.