How to Speed Up Your Startup

Another way to accelerate learning is for company founders to compare notes and share lessons. As FigLeaves's entrepreneurs closed their first private-placement round of financing, recalls McCallum, the VetExchange team peppered them with questions and requests: "How did you find funding? What did you do? Show us your private-placement documents. Share with us the things that helped you, the things that you found useful."

McCallum also remembers one five-hour rap session with Vikas Singla, the founder of SimplyCollectible Inc., during which Straus picked Singla's brain about the search-engine registration process. And Singla remembers a conversation with Straus, during which each man offered the other a job at his company. The whole point is that entrepreneurs can compress time by accelerating learning. "Go to a day-care center, and look at the children who are walking," says Straus. "Some start walking at 8 months. Others start walking at 14 months. It's almost always the same story: The ones who are walking earlier have older siblings. You learn by example, by guidance. That's part of the process."

Students of Speed

There's a nagging personal question behind the acceleration of strategy and tactics in the Web economy: If I work on Internet time, does that mean that I have to live on Internet time too?

No part of the world feels that question more deeply, more urgently, more viscerally, than Silicon Valley -- which is why it's fitting that three anthropologists (all of whom are based at San Jose State University) have been watching the people of Silicon Valley struggle with that issue at work, at home, and always in real time. Along with hundreds of student researchers, Chuck Darrah, 51; Jan English-Lueck, 46; and James Freeman, 63, have been conducting a 10-year ethnographic study of Valley culture -- from the perspective of everyone from project managers to hairdressers. They've interviewed hundreds of employees at such companies as Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, and Hewlett-Packard about work, home, identity, and community.

Now these anthropologists are engaged in perhaps their most ambitious, and certainly their most in-depth, investigation of all: the Families and Work in Silicon Valley Project, a painstakingly detailed study of the lives of 13 dual-career couples who have children. The project involves shadowing each family member -- husband, wife, and kids -- for at least three full days. In total, the three anthropologists spend between 170 and 200 hours observing a family's behavior. They endure grueling schedules -- spending up to 13 hours a day with a family member -- as well as periodic angst. As one teenager said to a researcher who accompanied him to school (no doubt trying to hide his anxiety): "There's nothing you might see that could embarrass me."

Years of field research and interviews have provided the anthropologists with a wealth of textured observations about the realities of how people in Silicon Valley live, work, and cope. Many of their findings corroborate the feelings of stress and anxiety that so many of us feel as we struggle to keep up. But their overall perspective is not one of doom and gloom. "One of the great lessons that we've learned is that people adapt," says Darrah, who notes that many of the Silicon Valley subjects he's studied are satisfied, despite the frenetic pace of their lives. Darrah quotes a typical sentiment: "I'd like to make some changes, but I'm generally pretty happy. My work is meaningful, and I enjoy my job, my coworkers, and my kids."

Another big-picture point: Many of us confuse two different phenomena. There's no question that certain aspects of business are speeding up. (How many companies used to launch products only every few months?) But much of what confuses us is our apparently insatiable desire, in an era of material abundance and limitless opportunity, to do more things -- as opposed to just doing the same things faster. "People have crowded their lives with an incredible amount of stuff," says Darrah, "but that stuff isn't necessarily moving any faster than it used to. There's just more of it."

How do people cope in this do-more-faster age? One reaction is to break tasks down into discrete chunks. What was once a one-hour meeting becomes a series of brief conversations in a hallway or in a parking lot. Likewise, tasks that used to get done in relatively uninterrupted large blocks of time become distributed throughout the day, several days, or even weeks. "It's a strategy of breaking everything down into manageable pieces that you work on whenever you have time," Darrah explains. "People seize any opportunity to take care of business, because they don't want to let a minute go by unused."