Why speed matters

Found on Daniel Lemures Blog linked by Simon Wilson

At the beginning of December 2025 I found on Simon Wilsons blog a link to an interesting post of Daniel Lemure, where he describes why speed matters in science.

I fully go with his arguments

1. A common mistake is to spend a lot of time—too much time—on a component of your project that does not matter. I once spent a lot of time building a podcast-like version of a course… only to find out later that students had no interest in the podcast format.
2. You learn by making mistakes. The faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn.
3. Your work degrades, becomes less relevant with time. And if you work slowly, you will be more likely to stick with your slightly obsolete work.

...but the right one of the following two charts made me curious:

I asked myself two questions:

1. Can this be the right curve also in business?

2. What can be a plausible loss function of speed for the worth of the result when doing business?

My practical experience in business says to me, that

• it is quite common to achieve a 80% result quite quickly and

• it takes takes quite a time and effort to slowly shift this 80% towards 90% or - let say - 95%

• but it takes very much time and a significant effort to get a perfect result of 98% or - let say - 99%

• And after all, if you might miss the market opportunity and spend further effort with obsolete product, it will only generate losses by truing to push an old or obsolete product into a market, that does not need it anymore

This observations led me quite quickly to think about a logarithmic loss in terms of speed. When you apply this to the quality in terms of speed curve, then the outcome will be slightly different from the above curve from Daniel Lemure, which is still plausible for me, but only for science.

The nearly linear relation in the lower left corner of Daniels "How it actually works" curve reflects that, scientists always have to quote prior research and a reference to an older topic with a better paper quality makes sense.

In the contrary, the business value of an nearly outdated product sinks quickly to zero and dramatically falls further down the zero, when you continue to produce the outdated product:

I hope this is helpfull ;)