TIME is your most ruthless competitor!

I’ve had the privilege of scaling tech startups and growth-stage ventures across SaaS, marketplace, and consumer sectors. From founding an early dotcom-era sailing portal and building the award-winning mobile innovator YPlan; to launching the international expansion of Airbnb-backed Resy, running EMEA for SeatGeek, and most recently leading TodayTix’s global B2B business - I’ve experienced the full arc of startup life first-hand, from bootstrapped scrappiness to private equity-backed rocketships.

I'm sharing some of the key lessons that have shaped how I think about building a successful early-stage business.

1. TIME is your most ruthless competitor!

Whether you're funding your startup with your last remaining savings, or sitting on 9 figures of PE investment capital, it makes no difference: time is your enemy.

Forget the incumbent market leader; ignore it when some scrappy startup is stealing your ideas: your real competitor is TIME. In startups, every delay and diversion costs momentum, morale, and money. My experience is that large funding rounds can induce a false sense of security in a team which diminishes the urgency of the mission, and it takes strong leadership to ensure this doesn't pervade the team.

A few years ago I came across a study comparing the causes of failure of high-funded startups vs bootstrapped ventures - the former were much more likely to cite “ran out of funding” as the key reason for failure, while the latter blamed “finding market fit”.

That hit home: at YPlan we'd raised $38m without entirely figuring out how to bolt the wings on. That investment was a vote of confidence driven by strong early execution, and our amazing investors’ willingness to bet on potential over certainty. But even with millions in the bank, the clock was ticking. Hitting the numbers mattered more than the hype.

And that’s the trap: funding and ace PR can breed false comfort, even among seasoned teams and investors.

In one turnaround role I took on, we reversed a 30% YoY decline in under eight months - not because we had more resources (in fact, after a re-org we had fewer), but because we ruthlessly prioritised, and made clear decisions early. That revenue flip contributed meaningfully to our eventual acquisition.

Speed doesn’t mean recklessness - it means difficult prioritising, decisive action, and understanding that “good now” often beats “perfect later”.

In the startup world, hesitation kills more businesses than competition ever will, and it takes positive urgency-fuelled leadership to beat the clock.

Let me know if you disagree!