Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters

Keith steps back from the interview chair to close out the series by synthesizing what six founders taught him about speed. The pattern that surprised him most: whatever industry or stage they're in, every founder was really describing the same thing, compressing the latency between making a decision and getting the evidence that tells you whether it worked. Keith revisits each guest's own definition of speed, takes on the myth that speed and quality trade off against each other, draws a hard line between fast and reckless, diagnoses why fast companies slow down as they scale, and closes with what AI changes (and doesn't change) about judgment and trust. He lands the whole series on one term: mission speed, the rate at which the mission advances in the direction you've chosen.

Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters is a six-episode limited series featuring six startup founders and operators who exemplify personal speed and have wrestled with it organizationally, exploring the systematic principles of speed and the critical tactics that make it sustainable as you scale.

In this episode

• 0:00 — Cold open: six guests, six definitions of speed
• 0:47 — Welcome to the finale, and introducing "mission speed"
• 1:50 — Defining speed as latency: Matt's, Harold's, and Jesse's versions
• 4:48 — Does speed cost you quality? Jesse's answer, and Matt's mechanism for making mistakes cheap
• 8:30 — Urgent versus reckless: Anna's "tenth man," Harold's case for trust, and Yaniv's "fix forward"
• 11:57 — Why fast companies slow down: Matt, Anna, and Dave on where the bottleneck moves as a team scales
• 17:41 — Diagnosing the engine: Yaniv's root cause fixes and "speed theater"
• 20:26 — Limiting factors and vision: Anna's "two plus two plus two" and Dave's "keystone of the vision"
• 24:21 — What AI changes, and doesn't: Yaniv, Matt, Harold, and Jesse on speed, judgment, and trust
• 30:39 — Keith's closing synthesis: mission speed, and thank-yous

The Host: Keith Lucas

Keith Lucas has spent almost 30 years in tech, building teams and advising companies. He's the author of Impact, a book for startup leaders who want to transform their teams from scrappy to scale, and hosts Speed, a podcast for startup leaders who want to move fast toward what matters.

Connect with Keith:

• linkedin.com/in/kvlucas
• https://keithvlucas.com/

Get the book: Impact — https://keithvlucas.com/impact/

Contact us: [email protected]

Speed Podcast Synthesis: www.keithvlucas.com/frameworks/speed

Guests featured in this episode

Harold Hughes — Founder & CEO, Divi. Revisited on speed as a signal of intent and his "fail fast, fail often" framing. 

Matt Curtis — CEO & Co-founder, Splendid Games. Revisited on defining speed as the time between decision and evidence, and treating experience as a "compression algorithm." 

Yaniv Bernstein — Founder & CTO, Vera. Revisited on "speed theater," the real cost AI has changed, and "boiling the lake." 

Jesse Stinebring — CEO & Co-founder, Blue Rose Research. Revisited on why speed and quality aren't actually in tension, and the value of "unique taste and flavor" in the age of cheap building. 

Anna Shedletsky — CEO & Co-founder, Instrumental. Revisited on urgent versus reckless, the "tenth man" concept, and her "two plus two plus two" operating cadence. 

David Baszucki — Founder & CEO, Roblox. Revisited on the Roblox Operating System and "the keystone of the vision." 

CREDITS

Produced by : Leah Barnum

Social Media: Julia Guagliardi www.stillwaters-creative.com

Editor: Jon Keur - www.wayfarerecording.com

Content Designer: Natalie Leroux  - www.studioeightyseven.com

Studio lighting/Setup - www.175productions.com

David Baszucki has been building Roblox for over twenty years, and his answer to "how do you move fast" isn't what you'd expect: take the long view first. In this episode of Speed, host Keith Lucas talks with Dave about the "magic quadrant" of pairing a long-term vision with daily execution, how speed changes shape as a company grows from 20 people to thousands, how he transfers urgency to individuals on his team, and what ownership really looks like at scale. They close on how Dave tells the difference between an on day and an off day, and why that self-awareness matters for a leader's decisions.

Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters is a six-episode limited series featuring six startup founders and operators who exemplify personal speed and have wrestled with it organizationally — exploring the systematic principles of speed and the critical tactics that make it sustainable as you scale.

In this episode

• 0:00 — David on "the keystone of the vision"
• 0:48 — Welcome, and introducing David Baszucki
• 4:16 — How David personally demonstrates speed: "take the long view" and "get stuff done"
• 13:43 — Building speed at 20-30 people vs. thousands: the Roblox Operating System
• 19:28 — How David transfers urgency to one person on his team
• 25:53 — Ownership as a marker of speed and leadership
• 28:15 — What changed (and what didn't) as Roblox scaled from dozens to thousands
• 30:43 — Recovery: how David tells an "on day" from an "off day"

The Guest: David Baszucki

David Baszucki is the Founder and CEO of Roblox, an immersive gaming and creation platform he started over twenty years ago that is now nearing 400 million monthly active users worldwide. His vision has driven Roblox's recognition as one of TIME's "100 Most Influential Companies," and by Fast Company for Most Innovative Companies, Best Workplaces for Innovators, and Innovation by Design. Previously, David founded Knowledge Revolution, where he and his brother Greg created Interactive Physics, a leading educational physics and mechanical design simulation software. David graduated from Stanford University as a General Motors Scholar in Electrical Engineering.

Connect with David:

• linkedin.com/in/davidbaszucki
• https://x.com/DavidBaszucki
• https://www.roblox.com/

The Host: Keith Lucas

Keith Lucas joined Roblox as employee #7 and later served as CPO and CTO, leading product, engineering, and operations as the company scaled. He went on to serve as COO of Instrumental and now advises leaders across AI, gaming, creator platforms, and enterprise technology. He is also the author of IMPACT and host of Speed.

Connect with Keith:

• linkedin.com/in/kvlucas
• https://keithvlucas.com/

Get the book: Impact — https://keithvlucas.com/impact/

Contact us: [email protected]

CREDITS

Produced by : Leah Barnum

Social Media: Julia Guagliardi www.stillwaters-creative.com

Editor: Jon Keur - www.wayfarerecording.com

Content Designer: Natalie Leroux  - www.studioeightyseven.com

Studio lighting/Setup - www.175productions.com

In this episode of Speed, host Keith Lucas — who worked alongside Anna at Instrumental from 2018 to 2020 — asks her what it really takes to move fast without breaking things. She talks about pairing conviction with open debate, the "10th man" principle for protecting dissent, and why she traded "leading from the front" for empowering ownership as Instrumental scaled. She also shares how the company pivoted from consumer electronics to AI data center infrastructure, the "2+2+2" framework behind 5x customer growth, and how she resets after a bad day.

Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters is a six-episode limited series featuring six startup founders and operators who exemplify personal speed and have wrestled with it organizationally — exploring the systematic principles of speed and the critical tactics that make it sustainable as you scale.

In this episode

00:00 – Welcome to Speed & introducing Anna-Katrina Shedletsky

01:50 – Conviction, debate, and fast decision-making with co-founder Sam Weiss

04:39 – The "10th Man": building a shield for productive dissent

05:44 – "This time better than the last": running pre-mortems, not postmortems

06:54 – A Keithism: the difference between urgent and reckless

08:50 – From leading the front to empowering ownership

16:02 – Instrumental's inflection point: pivoting to AI data center infrastructure

19:12 – Jensen Huang's "speed of light" and finding your limiting factors

20:26 – The "2+2+2" framework: six weeks from signed deal to delivered value

24:42 – Is speed vs. quality really a trade-off? Inside Instrumental's "Play to Win" values

29:42 – How great leaders recover: sleep, agency, and a little vengeance

34:31 – Closing thoughts

The Guest: Anna- Katrina Shedletsky

Anna-Katrina Shedletsky is the co-founder and CEO of Instrumental, which she founded to solve the 20 cents of every dollar spent in manufacturing that's wasted. Instrumental builds a Manufacturing Acceleration Platform, accelerating time-to-market in development and improving throughput in production for the world's most complex electronics. Before Instrumental, Anna spent six years as an Apple Product Design Engineer, leading system product design for the Apple Watch Series 1 and several iPods. She holds two degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and sits on the National Leadership Council for the Society for Science.

Connect with Anna:

• linkedin.com/in/annakatrinashedletsky
• https://x.com/anna_shedletsky
• https://instrumental.com/

The Host: Keith Lucas

Keith Lucas joined Roblox as employee #7 and later served as CPO and CTO, leading product, engineering, and operations as the company scaled. He went on to serve as COO of Instrumental and now advises leaders across AI, gaming, creator platforms, and enterprise technology. He is also the author of IMPACT and host of Speed.

Connect with Keith:

• linkedin.com/in/kvlucas
• https://keithvlucas.com/

Get the book: Impact — https://keithvlucas.com/impact/

Contact us: [email protected]

CREDITS

Produced by : Leah Barnum

Social Media: Julia Guagliardi - www.stillwaters-creative.com

Editor: Jon Keur - www.wayfarerecording.com

Content Designer: Natalie Leroux  - www.studioeightyseven.com

Studio lighting/Setup - www.175productions.com

Jesse Stinebring has spent his career solving a problem most people assume is unsolvable: getting speed and quality out of the same system. In this episode of Speed, host Keith Lucas talks with Jesse — co-founder and CEO of Blue Rose Research — about why campaigns can't afford to wait weeks for answers, how Blue Rose centralized its modeling to get both speed and consistency instead of picking one, and what he calls the real difference between fast-but-sloppy and fast-and-disciplined. They also get into how AI and coding agents are changing what Blue Rose builds heading into the midterms, and how Jesse recovers from the highs and lows of working in a business where the stakes are, literally, elections.

Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters is a six-episode limited series featuring six startup founders and operators who exemplify personal speed and have wrestled with it organizationally — exploring the systematic principles of speed and the critical tactics that make it sustainable as you scale.

In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome, and introducing Jesse Stinebring
• 2:03 — The speed Blue Rose has built, and why it matters to campaigns racing the clock
• 7:34 — Building a team and culture organized around speed
• 12:11 — Why speed and quality aren't actually in tension — and what Jesse calls the real answer: discipline
• 19:12 — Speed beyond the midterms: AI, coding agents, and protecting what makes Blue Rose's work unique
• 22:03 — Recovery: how Jesse resets after a hard day 

The Guest: Jesse Stinebring

Jesse Stinebring is the CEO of Blue Rose Research, which he co-founded in 2021 after a decade working in Democratic analytics beginning with Barack Obama's 2012 reelect. Today he leads Blue Rose's 50+ data scientists, researchers, social scientists, and analysts working to radically lower the barriers to better opinion research tools for big and small campaigns.

Connect with Jesse:

• linkedin.com/in/jesse-s-b490a22b
• https://blueroseresearch.org/

The Host: Keith Lucas

Keith Lucas joined Roblox as employee #7 and later served as CPO and CTO, leading product, engineering, and operations as the company scaled. He went on to serve as COO of Instrumental and now advises leaders across AI, gaming, creator platforms, and enterprise technology. He is also the author of IMPACT and host of Speed.

Connect with Keith:

• linkedin.com/in/kvlucas
• https://keithvlucas.com/

Get the book: Impact — https://keithvlucas.com/impact/

Contact us: [email protected]

CREDITS

Produced by : Leah Barnum

Social Media: Julia Guagliardi - www.stillwaters-creative.com

Editor: Jon Keur - www.wayfarerecording.com

Content Designer: Natalie Leroux  - www.studioeightyseven.com

Studio lighting/Setup - www.175productions.com

In this episode of Speed, host Keith Lucas talks with Yaniv Bernstein about what's actually changed for founders building with AI, why taking on technical debt aggressively is often the right call, how Vera balances speed with the trust required to help families navigate care for aging parents, and his go-to method for turning around a team that's gotten stuck.

Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters is a six-episode limited series featuring six startup founders and operators who exemplify personal speed and have wrestled with it organizationally — exploring the systematic principles of speed and the critical tactics that make it sustainable as you scale.

In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome, and introducing Yaniv Bernstein
• 1:45 — Speed today vs. a year ago: the 5-10x jump from agentic coding
• 6:50 — What Yaniv wishes every startup leader understood about speed — and why technical debt is often "good debt"
• 14:05 — Delivering speed and trust together at Vera
• 18:05 — How to turn around a team that's stuck — and why more process usually isn't the fix
• 24:04 — Recovery: using AI as a thought partner to get unstuck

The Guest: Yaniv Bernstein

Yaniv Bernstein is the Founder & CTO of Vera, an early-stage startup devoted to supporting people who are looking after aging parents. He's spent nearly 20 years in tech, including a decade as a software engineer and engineering leader at Google, followed by roles as a scale-up VP of Engineering and COO. A two-time founder, Yaniv has invested in and advised numerous startups, and co-hosts The Startup Podcast.

Connect with Yaniv:

• linkedin.com/in/ybernstein
• https://vera.guide/

The Host: Keith Lucas

Keith Lucas joined Roblox as employee #7 and later served as CPO and CTO, leading product, engineering, and operations as the company scaled. He went on to serve as COO of Instrumental and now advises leaders across AI, gaming, creator platforms, and enterprise technology. He is also the author of IMPACT and host of Speed.

Connect with Keith:

• linkedin.com/in/kvlucas
• https://keithvlucas.com/

Get the book: Impact — https://keithvlucas.com/impact/

Contact us: [email protected]

CREDITS

Produced by : Leah Barnum

Social Media: Julia Guagliardi - www.stillwaters-creative.com

Editor: Jon Keur - www.wayfarerecording.com

Content Designer: Natalie Leroux  - www.studioeightyseven.com

Studio lighting/Setup - www.175productions.com

In this episode of Speed, Matt Curtis joins host Keith Lucas to redefine what speed actually means: not raw execution velocity, but the time between a decision and the evidence that validates it. He shares the three habits behind it — clean data, cheap mistakes, and experience as a compression algorithm — and explains why small teams die of distraction while big ones die of dependencies.

Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters is a six-episode limited series featuring six startup founders and operators who exemplify personal speed and have wrestled with it organizationally — exploring the systematic principles of speed and the critical tactics that make it sustainable as you scale.

In this episode

00:00 – Welcome to Speed & introducing Matt Curtis

05:51 – Redefining speed: the time from decision to evidence

06:08 – Three levers for speed: clean data, cheap mistakes, and experience as a compression algorithm

10:25 – "Fail fast, fail often": removing ego from iteration

11:29 – Small teams vs. big teams: distraction vs. dependencies

13:52 – GREE's "slow is steady, steady is fast" and the limits of focus

15:51 – Vision + iteration: the one-two punch that built Roblox

19:31 – Splendid Games: how Roblox development has changed in 10 years

23:58 – Where AI fits into Splendid Games' workflow

26:13 – Is speed vs. quality really a trade-off?

29:27 – Quality as an accumulation of evidence, not perfectionism

31:51 – How Matt recovers: work hard, rest hard

The Guest: Matt Curtis

Matt Curtis has spent 15+ years at the intersection of games, platforms, and the communities that power them. Now he's getting back into his passion: building. He recently co-founded Splendid Games, a new game development studio focused on Roblox, which just wrapped its closed alpha, and he advises select companies navigating the creator economy and platform ecosystems. Previously, Matt spent six years as VP of Developer Relations at Roblox, and before that a decade at Zynga, GREE, and Kabam leading titles that collectively generated over $1B in revenue, including Words with Friends 2, CSR2 Racing, Zynga Poker, and The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth.

Connect with Matt:

• linkedin.com/in/matthewcurtisroblox
• https://www.splendidgames.gg/

The Host: Keith Lucas

Keith Lucas joined Roblox as employee #7 and later served as CPO and CTO, leading product, engineering, and operations as the company scaled. He went on to serve as COO of Instrumental and now advises leaders across AI, gaming, creator platforms, and enterprise technology. He is also the author of IMPACT and host of Speed.

Connect with Keith:

• linkedin.com/in/kvlucas
• https://keithvlucas.com/

Get the book: Impact — https://keithvlucas.com/impact/

Contact us: [email protected]

CREDITS

Produced by : Leah Barnum

Social Media: Julia Guagliardi - www.stillwaters-creative.com

Editor: Jon Keur - www.wayfarerecording.com

Content Designer: Natalie Leroux  - www.studioeightyseven.com

Studio lighting/Setup - www.175productions.com

Harold Hughes has built companies at two very different speeds: hand-drawing wireframes on paper a decade ago, and shipping AI-generated MVPs in an afternoon today. In this episode of Speed, host Keith Lucas talks with Harold — founder of NFNTE Capital and Divi, and a 30+ company angel investor — about what it actually takes to move fast without breaking trust. They cover building critical mass in the early days, how AI has changed Divi's product cycle, why speed can be both a founder's biggest edge and their biggest risk, and how Harold recovers after a bad day.

In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome, and introducing Harold Hughes
• 2:28 — From Band Wagon to Divi: building critical mass fast
• 5:02 — Juggling product, brand, funding, and outreach without losing focus
• 7:38 — Building Divi's product with AI — from hand-drawn sketches to AI-built MVPs
• 13:21 — Balancing speed with security and trust when the product touches people's money
• 16:06 — Advice for founders: speed as a competitive edge 
• 20:59 — Recovery: how Harold resets after a bad day

The Guest: Harold Hughes

Harold Hughes is the Founder & CEO of NFNTE Capital and Divi. Through NFNTE Capital, he's built entrepreneurship and AI education programs adopted by organizations like the University of Texas and the NBA; through Divi, he's building the intelligence platform for early-stage investors. A serial entrepreneur and active angel investor, Harold has backed more than 30 startups — including Liquid Death, AG1, and Partake Foods — and authored A Kids Book About Blockchain. He holds dual degrees and an MBA from Clemson University, and lives in Charlotte with his wife and two kids.

Connect with Harold:

• linkedin.com/in/haroldphughes
• https://www.instagram.com/haroldph
• https://divi.fund/
• https://nfnte.com/

A Kids Book About Blockchain by Harold Hughes (2021) — https://a.co/d/0iiyua6S

The Host: Keith Lucas

Keith Lucas joined Roblox as employee #7 and later served as CPO and CTO, leading product, engineering, and operations as the company scaled. He went on to serve as COO of Instrumental and now advises leaders across AI, gaming, creator platforms, and enterprise technology. He is also the author of IMPACT and host of Speed.

Connect with Keith:

• linkedin.com/in/kvlucas
• https://keithvlucas.com/

Get the book: Impact — https://keithvlucas.com/impact/

Contact us: [email protected]

CREDITS

Produced by : Leah Barnum

Social Media: Julia Guagliardi - www.stillwaters-creative.com

Editor: Jon Keur - www.wayfarerecording.com

Content Designer: Natalie Leroux  - www.studioeightyseven.com

Studio lighting/Setup - www.175productions.com

Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters is Keith Lucas's follow-up to his book Impact, a six-episode limited series exploring how inspiring founders think about speed: what it is, why it matters, and how they cultivate it.

The series splits into two halves. The first three founders are early-stage and building with AI from the ground up: Harold Hughes (Divi) on speed as a signal of intent, Matt Curtis (Splendid Games) on how vision and iteration together unlock rapid development, and Yaniv Bernstein (Vera) on how AI coding has changed the way he hires and scales his engineering team. The next two founders are at the scaling stage, maintaining speed and culture as they grow, with the speed of service delivery itself as a competitive advantage: Jesse Stinebring (Blue Rose Research) and Anna Shedletsky (Instrumental). The series closes with David Baszucki, who grew Roblox from a team of one to thousands, and closes with Keith's own synthesis episode pulling the whole series together.

The host: Keith Lucas

Keith Lucas joined Roblox as employee #7 and later served as CPO and CTO, leading product, engineering, and operations as the company scaled. He went on to serve as COO of Instrumental and now advises leaders across AI, gaming, creator platforms, and enterprise technology. He is also the author of IMPACT and host of Speed.

Connect with Keith:

• linkedin.com/in/kvlucas
• https://keithvlucas.com/

Get the book: Impact — https://keithvlucas.com/impact/

Contact us: [email protected]

CREDITS

Produced by : Leah Barnum

Social Media: Julia Guagliardi - www.stillwaters-creative.com

Editor: Jon Keur - www.wayfarerecording.com

Content Designer: Natalie Leroux  - www.studioeightyseven.com

Studio lighting/Setup - www.175productions.com

"I can buy this thing and have results next week, versus I wait four months and maybe something happens. It's like, I have a problem now."

A first look at Anna Shedletsky's conversation with Keith Lucas, on how speed became Instrumental's biggest competitive advantage.

She also talks with Keith about protecting dissent, trading "leading from the front" for empowering ownership, and the pivot from consumer electronics to AI data center infrastructure.

Coming September 15, Speed: Moving Fast Towards What Matters is a six episode limited series featuring six startup founders and operators who exemplify personal speed and have wrestled with it organizationally. Each conversation explores the systematic principles of speed and the tactics that make it sustainable as you scale.

"Speed is a critical part of the intention demonstration."

That's how Harold Hughes — founder of Divi and NFNTE Capital, and an angel investor in 30+ startups — thinks about building fast without losing anyone's trust.

Coming September 15, 2026,  Keith Lucas sits down with Harold Hughes, to talk about building momentum, creating with AI, and why speed can be a founder’s greatest advantage and biggest risk.