"Perfectionism and startups do not go together very well"

Airbnb's Joe Gebbia at NPR's How I Built This Summit in 2019

Joe Gebbia: Perfectionism and startups do not go together very well.

Guy Raz: Yeah.

Joe Gebbia: Because if you wait for the perfect moment to ship your service and your product and put your idea into the world, it's probably never going to happen. And there's a lot of stories out of, pick any incubator, not just Y Combinator, of companies that waited and waited and waited and waited and waited, and some of them never shipped at all and the teams fizzled out, the funding fizzled out. And one of the lessons that we really took out of that program was how important it is to release, don't launch. Launch builds this thing up in your head, "Oh my God, it's a launch. It has to be perfect. We've got to do everything just right." If you're doing a release cycle, it doesn't have to be perfect, because you're constantly iterating. And so I think, in the early days, having the quickest, the fastest release cycles for an idea, especially software, is so, so important.