• Home
  • Latest
  • Fortune 500
  • Finance
  • Tech
  • Leadership
  • Lifestyle
  • Rankings
  • Multimedia

Trendingnow

1

Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says if he were 25 today, he'd chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI

2

Even as Elon Musk calls philanthropy ‘very hard,’ everyday Americans gave a record $617 billion—despite feeling the squeeze over the cost of living

3

Egg companies made $1.22 billion in profit off a $6 carton — now they’re buying their way out of a price-fixing case with 53 million donated eggs

1

Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says if he were 25 today, he'd chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI

2

Even as Elon Musk calls philanthropy ‘very hard,’ everyday Americans gave a record $617 billion—despite feeling the squeeze over the cost of living

3

Egg companies made $1.22 billion in profit off a $6 carton — now they’re buying their way out of a price-fixing case with 53 million donated eggs
Commentary

How slow decision-making can ruin your business

By
Karl Martin
Karl Martin
and
Bethany Cianciolo
Bethany Cianciolo
Down Arrow Button Icon
By
Karl Martin
Karl Martin
and
Bethany Cianciolo
Bethany Cianciolo
Down Arrow Button Icon
October 30, 2015, 11:30 AM ET
Karl Martin, founder and CTO of Nymi
Karl Martin, founder and CTO of NymiPhotograph by Stephen Oung
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

The Entrepreneur Insider network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in America’s startup scene contribute answers to timely questions about entrepreneurship and careers. Today’s answer to the question “What are some common mistakes young entrepreneurs make?” is written by Karl Martin, founder and CTO of Nymi.

When founding a new business, you have to accept that you might drop the ball sometimes. It’s not about perfection, but rather about setting priorities and disciplining yourself to keep them. Do well at the things that will move the business forward, and for everything else, just don’t make any fatal mistakes.

However, this leads to a more macro-level challenge. As an entrepreneur, you’re defining your business from the ground up. What business paths should you explore, and which are not worth your time? This has been a core challenge for me from the beginning. While my team and I have broadly applicable technology, we have to accept that we can’t do everything. Having limited resources is the common variable that binds all startups.

The biggest mistake that I see many young entrepreneurs make is not clearly defining which opportunities they will target. This can be framed as a sort of Schrödinger’s cat experiment for startups. In the classic thought experiment, physicist Erwin Schrödinger supposed that a cat could be simultaneously alive and dead if its fate was dependent on the unobserved state of a quantum system. As entrepreneurs, our number one driver is always achieving success for our ventures and keeping them alive. But a company’s fate is dependent on an unknown: Which of the multitude of opportunities is the winning path? The decision is usually made with very limited information, leading to a highly uncertain outcome.

See also: This is why so many startups end up in financial trouble

The natural psychological response to this dilemma that many inexperienced entrepreneurs have is to simply not make a definitive choice — to run multiple options at the same time. But believing the cat is still alive somewhere in the flurry of activities is a fallacy. With limited resources, you risk running out of capital before achieving important proof points to keep the business alive.

The answer to this conundrum feels unnatural, but it involves making decisions quickly and resolutely with limited information. What’s often not obvious is that if you move fast, you have greater opportunity to recover from mistakes and try another option should the first choice not pan out (also known as the classic startup “pivot”).

In the case of Nymi, we had originally positioned our wearable authentication product, the Nymi Band, as a consumer device. We pushed early with a pre-order campaign and got lots of invaluable market feedback. Before we even fully launched the product, the data showed us that the interest in our product was too broad across consumer applications and would be very hard to execute effectively. We decided to pivot and focus on enterprise use cases that allowed us to create a user experience centered around truly burning problems in the market.

Many aspects of being an entrepreneur feel psychologically unnatural. Going fast and hard down a path with high uncertainty goes against our natural tendencies to mitigate risk. But avoiding failure simply leads to a slow death as your resources dry up. By making fast decisions and failing early, you realize that your cat may actually have a few lives to give.

 

Read all responses to the Entrepreneur Insider question: What are some common mistakes young entrepreneurs make?

This is where most startups go wrong by Stephen Lake, CEO of Thalmic Labs.

Doing these 3 things will destroy your startup by Michael Gasiorek, editor-in-chief of Startup Grind.

The avoidable mistake every entrepreneur makes by Andrew Filev, founder and CEO of Wrike.

About the Authors
By Karl Martin
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon
By Bethany Cianciolo
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon
Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

Latest in Commentary

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025

Most Popular

Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Finance
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
By Fortune Editors
October 20, 2025
Fortune Secondary Logo
Rankings
  • 100 Best Companies
  • Fortune 500
  • Global 500
  • Fortune 500 Europe
  • Most Powerful Women
  • World's Most Admired Companies
  • See All Rankings
  • Lists Calendar
Sections
  • Finance
  • Fortune Crypto
  • Features
  • Leadership
  • Health
  • Commentary
  • Success
  • Retail
  • Mpw
  • Tech
  • Lifestyle
  • CEO Initiative
  • Asia
  • Politics
  • Conferences
  • Europe
  • Newsletters
  • Personal Finance
  • Environment
  • Magazine
  • Education
Customer Support
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Customer Service Portal
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms Of Use
  • Single Issues For Purchase
  • International Print
Commercial Services
  • Advertising
  • Fortune Brand Studio
  • Fortune Analytics
  • Fortune Conferences
  • Business Development
  • Group Subscriptions
About Us
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • About Us
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map
  • Facebook icon
  • Twitter icon
  • LinkedIn icon
  • Instagram icon
  • Pinterest icon

Latest in Commentary

katie
CommentaryData centers
Katie McGinty: The energy economy’s biggest waste problem is already inside the system
By Kathleen “Katie” McGintyJuly 6, 2026
18 minutes ago
cc
CommentaryEducation
Former Trump official: Washington finally let Pell Grants pay for welding school, then buried the idea in 85 pages of red tape
By Caroline CasagrandeJuly 6, 2026
2 hours ago
k
CommentaryBox office
How Hollywood’s youngest filmmakers are exposing Gen Z’s real problem with AI
By Reid LitmanJuly 5, 2026
23 hours ago
k
Commentary250 Years of Innovation
Media leadership unity in defying Trump’s assault on free speech: standing tall against historic comparisons
By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Jeff Bewkes, Kay Koplovitz, Tom Glocer and Marvin KalbJuly 4, 2026
2 days ago
ds
CommentarySoftware
I argued with the father of open source for 2 years. Now the AI fight is the same — only bigger
By David SiegelJuly 3, 2026
3 days ago
ashok
Commentary250 Years of Innovation
The greatest startup in history: What we can learn from America’s founders at today’s AI frontier
By Ashok N. SrivastavaJuly 3, 2026
3 days ago

Most Popular

Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says if he were 25 today, he'd chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI
AI
Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary says if he were 25 today, he'd chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI
By Marco Quiroz-GutierrezJuly 5, 2026
21 hours ago
Even as Elon Musk calls philanthropy ‘very hard,’ everyday Americans gave a record $617 billion—despite feeling the squeeze over the cost of living
Success
Even as Elon Musk calls philanthropy ‘very hard,’ everyday Americans gave a record $617 billion—despite feeling the squeeze over the cost of living
By Preston ForeJuly 4, 2026
2 days ago
Egg companies made $1.22 billion in profit off a $6 carton — now they’re buying their way out of a price-fixing case with 53 million donated eggs
Law
Egg companies made $1.22 billion in profit off a $6 carton — now they’re buying their way out of a price-fixing case with 53 million donated eggs
By Wyatte Grantham-Philips and The Associated PressJuly 2, 2026
4 days ago
The stock market is about to suffer a 'snapback' and will lose much of this year's gains as 'speculation is hitting extreme levels,' BofA warns
Investing
The stock market is about to suffer a 'snapback' and will lose much of this year's gains as 'speculation is hitting extreme levels,' BofA warns
By Jason MaJuly 5, 2026
15 hours ago
Meet the Zillennials: The luckiest micro-generation in the workforce, born between 1993 and 1998
AI
Meet the Zillennials: The luckiest micro-generation in the workforce, born between 1993 and 1998
By Nick LichtenbergJuly 3, 2026
3 days ago
Mark Zuckerberg takes business calls on a jet ski wearing his $800 Meta glasses—and insists 'the other person could not tell'
Big Tech
Mark Zuckerberg takes business calls on a jet ski wearing his $800 Meta glasses—and insists 'the other person could not tell'
By Sydney LakeJuly 5, 2026
23 hours ago

© 2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information
FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.