The First Rule of Building Anything: Why Better Isn’t Better

After all of my struggle and pain in entrepreneurship, and after leaving Cambridge (which at the time was the top university in the world for entrepreneurship studies), I landed on just a few hard rules I believed in. Maybe they’re obvious (...of course, the best rules usually are) but I thought some might benefit from me sharing them.

Rule 1:

Better (usually) is not a winner. Worse but simpler and faster > better but harder.

People care more about saving time, money, and effort than they do about quality. In fact, people often actively reject better when it makes more work. This is something a lot of product and founder folks don’t understand—and that misunderstanding tends to cause a good amount of pain.

For example, take Qualtrics (nothing against Qualtrics, which is a great company). It’s built on the reality that conducting real customer interviews is hard, time-consuming, and often a logistical mess. But sending out a quick NPS survey is easy. You get a number, you can chart it, and you can show it to a board or a client with no effort. It’s become the standard, despite being a pretty poor tool for insight, because it is near 0 labor.

You’ll find this pattern across every industry. Construction. Sales. Healthcare. It’s also why there’s reason to be skeptical of EV adoption at scale: a better product that’s still harder to use rarely displaces an easier one.

The hard truth is, we are actively choosing to build a world (over and over again) where worse but easier wins. We are getting what we want ...and there is a decent chance it will turn out to be worse.

If you're building anything new, you need to ponder that.