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January 8, 2026

Building fast is a moral position

Slow builds are expensive. Expensive builds die. Founders run out of energy. Companies run out of runway. Significant others run out of patience.

For a solo founder without institutional backing, time is the scarcest resource. A product that takes 18 months to get to market will be built by someone who spent those months paying rent, not building. That's not a failure of will. That's arithmetic.

AI-assisted development changed the math. We can now build in days or weeks what used to take months or years. I can deploy in days not because I'm cutting corners, but because the gap between idea and working software is shorter than it's ever been. The bottleneck has moved from "can I build this" to "should I build this."

The moral dimension is this: if you have something that genuinely helps people, and you can build it, why delay? It's a choice to let the problem persist longer than it has to.

Don't fall in love with your products, fall in love with problems and solve them by building great products.

Everett Steele
Everett Steele Founder of Meridian, a venture studio building software companies with AI. He writes about operations, building, and the way he thinks about both. Father, Husband, Veteran, ATLien. Connect on LinkedIn