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My dad died when I was 25, and it definitely rewired me.

Ever since, I've had a possibly-unhealthy urgency to accomplish as much as humanly possible, borne of a low-grade fear that my actuarial life table may be a bit shorter than everyone else's. (Thanks, Freud.)

Professionally, the result is that I move at three speeds: fast, faster, fast AF.

And candidly, I assumed that's how every entrepreneur operated.

Then early in my run as CEO of Hampton, co-founder Joe Speiser paid me a compliment that stuck with me. He said something like: your speed, your momentum, your urgency, it's incredible.

And I remember thinking, wait — isn't this just the speed?

Shockingly, it's not.

A ton of companies just move at medium-level speed, and they don't necessarily have a speed problem because their people are slow but rather because nobody ever showed them what fast could even look like.

Which is why I really believe that one of the most important jobs — if not the most important job — of the CEO at a founder-led company is to build and maintain a sense of urgency.

Not to request it, or put it on a values poster.

But actually to create it, visibly, on a schedule.

Here's one way I did it as CEO.

Every Friday morning at 9am, in the same company Slack channel, I posted a Loom of me walking through a deck. Same deck template every week: company roadmap, goals, team accomplishments, challenges, customer feedback, shout-outs.

The structure was the same, the content changed and evolved as we grew.

And I voiced it over with the enthusiasm of a coke-fueled Wall Street trader in the late 80s — every single week. 52 weeks a year, for over two years straight.

Sounds simple — maybe even a little silly or over-the-top?

But that ritual set the pace for the entire company.

It became our baseline mph: how fast we shipped, how fast we communicated, how fast reports and scorecards got updated, how fast customer feedback got closed out.

Your team can't run at a speed they can't see.

Urgency isn't a trait you hire for and hope spreads. It's a rhythm you demonstrate in public until it becomes the water everyone swims in.

Commure CEO Tanay Tandon wrote an internal memo about exactly this, shared last week by Sequoia's Alfred Lin. Commure's most challenged company value is "Speed Above All Else," and Tandon says he gets the same pushback weekly: we're in healthcare, you can have it good or have it fast. His answer: that's a false dichotomy designed to pigeonhole you into mediocrity.

He leans on Frank Slootman's line that without leaders driving urgency, every organization settles into a lethargic pace. And that a 20% improvement isn't enough to feel. As a leader, you have to find a way to do something 5x faster, so the change is palpable.

The memo has some sharp elbows (there's a whole bit about hiring the slightly unhinged), but the core observation matches everything I've seen: slow companies aren't being careful. They're just slow. Speed and quality come from the same place, which is competence plus focus. And speed is a leadership output, not a personality trait you hope walks in the door.

If you're the founder/CEO, here's the truth: you are the pace car.

There's no version of this where your company moves faster than you demonstrate, week after week, in public.

So ask yourself: how do YOU set the speed at your company? What's your version of the Friday 9am deck? Where, exactly, does your team learn what "fast" means, and when's the last time you did something 5x faster than normal just to show them their ceiling can be challenged?

I came by my urgency the hard way, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But I don't think you need the grief, you can just build the urgency on purpose.

Obama dropped his summer list, 11 books deep, everyone from Colson Whitehead to Michael Pollan. I've only read one of them so far, Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, and it was flat-out great. If you're a big beach-reader and you have room for one more, start there.

Early in my Motley Fool days, a manager handed me a rule I've never stopped using: if you wouldn't want something you wrote on the front page of the NYT, don't write it. Turns out it's Warren Buffett's newspaper test, and it's still the fastest integrity filter I know. I've used it ever since to teach my teams how to make the hard calls, in writing and everywhere else.

Vanta's CMO wrote a firsthand account of turning down Apple for a startup nobody had heard of, on the logic that helping build the next Apple beat making Apple 0.1% better. I made the same trade years ago, picking The Motley Fool over the World Bank, and the "dream job" on paper was the one I'd have learned the least at. Sometimes the gut call and the risky call are the same call.

Hit reply and tell me how you set the pace at your company.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan