Make Haste, Slowly

There is a bar in Amsterdam called Festina Lente. We used to go there on Fridays with the Framer team for a drink. The name stuck around and eventually became one of our values.

Festina Lente is Latin for “make haste, slowly”. Let me explain what it means to me.

Startups have to move fast. You and your team need to have a bias to action. Get shit done. Act swiftly. Repeat. Without speed, you die.

But it also takes a long time to build a significant company. There are outliers that seem to blow up overnight, but most startups are building for a long time before reaching any real success.

Festina Lente is how we remind ourselves to do both.

When people join Framer, we try to teach them both in week one. Ship something, but don’t pull any all-nighters. Do the work, but don’t overdo the work. Overdoing it burns you out.

There are moments where the company goes all out. We have a huge release coming up and a lot of folks are pulling out all the stops to make it happen. That’s part of it.

After that though, it’s back to regular programming. Kind of like a 9 to 5, but faster.