The Best Way To Kill Your Startup & What I Learned Doing Just That

Shane Mac, CEO and co-founder of XMTP Labs, argues that a startup's best defense against failure is speed of iteration, achieved through small teams that stay close to a specific use case and its customers rather than pursuing a broad platform vision. He draws on Zaarly, which he says raised $35m+ and hired 50+ people in 2010 before failing because its strategy outran its vision and it never obsessed over a specific use case. He notes that XMTP later killed its app to focus solely on developers, which he calls its best decision, and reports over 500 developers building with XMTP and 4.5m identities on the network.