By Gene Kwon, Salt Lake City, UT
The Moment You Realize You’ll Never Have Enough Data
Every founder hits the same wall eventually. You want one more week of numbers, one more round of feedback, one more signal that the decision in front of you is safe. That week never comes without a cost. Something else moves while you wait: a competitor, a customer, a market condition. I learned early that waiting for certainty is its own decision, and usually the wrong one.
Early in my career I treated missing information like a problem to solve before acting. Now I treat it as the normal condition of the job. Almost no decision that matters gets made with full information. If it did, it wouldn’t need a decision maker. It would just need a calculator.
Why More Data Isn’t Always the Answer
There’s a comfortable myth that says the founders who win are the ones who research the longest and gather the most inputs before moving. Some of that is true. But I’ve watched plenty of smart people drown a good instinct in a spreadsheet. At some point, more data stops improving the decision and starts delaying it.
The harder skill isn’t gathering information. It’s knowing when you have enough of it to act, and when you’re just stalling because the decision feels heavy. I ask myself one question when I notice I’m circling a choice: am I still learning something new, or am I just re-reading what I already know? If it’s the second one, it’s time to move.
Betting On People Over Plans
I’ve said before that I pay closer attention to people than to plans, and that habit is really a response to incomplete information. Plans are built on assumptions that go stale fast. A market shifts, a partner changes their mind, a product needs to pivot six months in. When the plan breaks, which it usually does, what’s left is the people executing it.
So when I’m short on data, I lean harder on judgment about the team in the room. Can they adapt when the plan they built turns out to be wrong? Can they tell me honestly when something isn’t working, instead of protecting a decision they’re attached to? That tells me more about the odds of success than any projection does.
Treat Decisions Like Experiments, Not Verdicts
One thing that changed how I operate is separating decisions into two categories: the ones I can reverse and the ones I can’t. Most business decisions, even the scary-looking ones, are more reversible than they feel in the moment. You can change a hire, adjust a pricing model, walk back a partnership. Treating a reversible decision like a permanent one is where a lot of founders lose time.
For anything reversible, I move fast and treat the choice as an experiment. I’d rather learn something in a month by acting than spend that month debating in a room. For the small number of decisions that really are permanent, I slow down and involve more people. But I try to be honest with myself about which category I’m actually in, because it’s tempting to inflate an ordinary decision into a big one just to justify hesitating.
Diligence Isn’t the Opposite of Speed
There’s a version of “moving fast” that just means being careless, and I don’t think that’s the lesson here. Staying diligent and staying nimble aren’t opposites. Diligence, to me, means being disciplined about what you check before you act, not checking everything before you act. You pick the two or three things that would actually change your decision, confirm those, and let the rest go.
That’s different from acting on a hunch alone. A hunch untested against anything is just a guess. But a hunch checked against the one or two facts that matter most is usually enough to move on.
What I Tell People Who Are Stuck
When someone tells me they’re stuck on a decision because they don’t have enough information, I ask what specific piece of information they’re actually missing. Most of the time, they can’t name it. They just have a general discomfort with the unknown, which no amount of research fixes, because the unknown never fully goes away.
The businesses I’ve helped build didn’t happen because every question got answered first. They happened because we made calls, watched what happened, and adjusted. That’s not a workaround for incomplete information. It’s the actual job.