If you want to fail quickly, hire people right now.
Date
Dec 16, 2025
Classification
- Startups
#
- Success/Failure Analysis
- Organization/Leadership
Shin Dong-jun / Aha Production, CEO
This is an article published in the 12/16 [Assistant Manager Shin's Business Prompt Newsletter].
Every week, we deliver carefully selected generative AI prompts that can be immediately applied to your work, along with management insights from global innovative entrepreneurs.
The winning formula for startups proven by statistics is 'age' and 'this'
🫑 3-Line Summary
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An analysis of data from 2.7 million entrepreneurs revealed that the average age of entrepreneurs who built top 0.1% companies is 45, and that those in their 50s have a success rate 1.8 times higher than those in their 30s.
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You must keep in mind that 'premature scaling,' which involves hiring managers or sales personnel before the product is even validated, is a fatal mistake that increases a startup's failure rate by 20–40%.
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Instead of expanding your size by increasing your workforce out of vague anxiety, focus on first proving your survival in the market through thorough A/B testing and hypothesis verification.
🥦 Insight
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Is that job posting perhaps just for 'playing CEO'?
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Are you perhaps feeling a sense of pride as you watch the number of desks in your office increase? To be blunt, hiring before finding Product-Market Fit (PMF) is not proof of growth, but merely a "bill of costs." As the workforce grows, the organization develops inertia, becoming a massive burden that cannot be moved when it is actually time to pivot.
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Statistics do not lie. The 'wisdom' of those in their 40s and 50s, who know when to slam on the brakes, increases the chances of survival more than the genius of those in their 20s overflowing with 'spirit.' Ask yourself whether the hiring you are currently attempting is truly due to a labor shortage, or if it is merely to soothe your own anxiety.
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It is not that you cannot work because there are no people. Check if you are simply gathering people without any proven 'work' to offer. Take down the job posting right now, and use that time to refine just one more piece of text on your landing page to test customer response.
— View original —
0. Introduction: Silicon Valley's Ghost 'Speed'
Move fast and break things.
This sentence from Facebook, which has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 10 years, is
It has penetrated deep into the Korean startup scene.
We firmly believed that speed was survival and a virtue.
The same was true for K, a 24-year-old genius developer.
K, who dropped out of a prestigious university and jumped into the startup world
I was obsessed with the idea that I had to dominate the market before competitors appeared.
His idea was brilliant,
Investors gave him seed money, expecting a 'second Mark Zuckerberg'.
K started 'Blitzscaling' the day after the investment funds were deposited into the account.
We hired a high-salaried sales director and marketing director before the product was even completed.
The reason was that "if we don't hire now, we will miss out on good talent."
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