Day 140 - Speed Always Wins

February 25, 2026

Episode Theme:
Why speed beats caution in the long run.

Key Topics:

IBM-era networks and the dominance of Token Ring
The rise of Ethernet as a “reckless” alternative
Why fast, flawed systems outperform slow, perfect ones
Speed as a form of safety
Early failure vs. late failure
Guardrails vs. paralysis
Learning in real environments
Shipping before everything feels ready
Speed as the path to quality
The danger of over-polishing ideas nobody wants

Notable Takeaways:

Speed exposes real problems faster than planning.
Late failure is more expensive than early failure.
Quality improves through feedback, not debate.
Guardrails should guide speed, not replace it.
Progress comes from shipping, learning, and correcting.

Suggested Reflections:

Where are you delaying action in the name of safety?
What would you learn faster by shipping sooner?
Are your processes protecting quality—or postponing reality?
What mistake would be cheaper to make now than later?

Memorable Line (Paraphrase):

“Speed creates its own kind of safety.”

Episode Transcript

Guy Reams (00:00.674)
This is day 140, speed always wins. When I was in the early days of my career, IBM still held control in the business world. Open systems were just starting to take over and local area networks were everywhere, or starting to become everywhere. Token ring networks, holdovers from terminal systems and other closed architectures were still considered the best path forward. They were safe, reliable and slow.

Then came this crazy idea somebody put on the back of a napkin. They called it Ethernet, a contention-based arbitration method that seemed reckless by comparison. It was unreliable, full of errors, but fast. Guess which technology won? The fast one. I've been thinking a lot about that lately. The pattern is repeating itself over and over again in the technology business. The safe choice gets studied and debated, while that fast choice ships and learns.

Speed creates its own kind of safety because it lets you correct course before the consequences compound. When you move slowly, you might avoid one class of mistake, but you guarantee another, the mistake of arriving too late. This does not mean recklessness. I need guardrails, I need governance and security. Those things are critical, not optional, but I also need speed and I need that just as much. Speed solves a lot of problems that caution cannot.

It surfaces the real issues faster than any planning session. It builds momentum when uncertainty tries to freeze you in place. It keeps you in the game long enough to get good at playing it.

The tension is real. Every time I slow down to add another layer of process, I tell myself, it is the responsible thing to do. And sometimes it is. But more often than not, I'm just postponing the moment when I find out the idea actually works. I'm trading the discomfort of early failure for the much larger pain of late failure, the kind that comes after months of polish on something nobody wanted in the first place. Speed solves a lot of problems that caution cannot.

Guy Reams (02:06.772)
Ethernet won the debate because it got into a world and proved itself while Token Ring was still being perfected. It was not flawless, but it was there, working, improving in real environments with real feedback. The errors got fixed, the reliability came later, but speed always was first and speed made everything else possible. So I'm choosing speed again, not speed instead of quality, of course, but speed is the path to quality.

Not speed without guardrails, but speed as the thing that tells me where the guardrails actually need to go. I will build, I will ship, I will learn. I will move fast enough that the mistakes stay small and the corrections stay cheap. The next time I'm tempted to add another gate, another review, another layer of safety that mostly just adds time, I will ask myself one question. What would the grandfathers of Ethernet do? Then I will just ship it.