Crypto markets are on fire. Digital asset trading volumes have exploded following regulatory clarity under the Trump administration, and FalconX—a prime brokerage serving institutional crypto traders—is feeling the heat. With clients working around the clock chasing opportunities, Jennifer Leung, VP of People at the fast-growing startup, faces a challenge that shows up at most scaling companies.
“In trading, where markets run 24/7 and the pace is relentless, employee well-being is a top priority,” Leugn explains, “At FalconX, we’ve focused on sustaining high performance by building in recovery, prioritization, and manager support.
Instead of accepting burnout as the cost of hypergrowth, Leung has discovered something counterintuitive: the companies scaling most successfully are those whose leaders deliberately slow down their decision-making to speed up their execution. This “paradox of pause” is emerging as the defining characteristic of leaders who scale without breaking their teams.
Here’s what that looks like in action.
Step 1: Gather Information Before You Build Solutions
When Naomi Allen needed to make the biggest decision of her CEO career—pivoting Brightline’s entire business model while laying off 200 people—she didn’t call an emergency board meeting or gather her executive team for a crisis sprint. Instead, she went for a long walk at her beach house in Aptos.
“The actual pause itself happened over the course of a long weekend where I had downtime and took a couple of long walks,” Allen recalls. “And so there was an actual manifestation of this decision, but it was after months of preparedness.”
Brightline, a mental health platform for children and families, was facing a classic startup crossroads. Their employer-focused model wasn’t generating sustainable unit economics, and Allen knew a radical pivot was necessary. But rather than making a snap decision, she invested months in what she calls “information gathering”—scenario planning, stakeholder conversations, and psychological preparation for worst-case outcomes.
“I was in information gathering mode. And at the same time that was happening, I was thinking about, okay, let’s play it forward. What’s the worst thing that happens if I do this and it fails?” Allen describes. The preparation included both analytical and emotional work: “Both gathering information around my own psyche and personal will to do the pivot, but also thinking about those negative, potential negative outcomes.”
The result? When execution time came, Allen navigated one of the most challenging corporate pivots imaginable—and she wrote a Medium piece communicating the change to her entire set of stakeholders. Months later, the company is beginning to execute on this very strategy and finding traction.
Step 2: Schedule Thinking Time Before You Need It
Mike Fey, CEO of Island, the enterprise browser company, has built this philosophy into his company’s DNA. After decades in cybersecurity at companies like McAfee, Fey founded Island with a methodical approach that challenges startup orthodoxy. Before taking any funding, he and his team made over 100 customer conversations to validate their browser security concept.
But Fey’s approach goes deeper than thorough market research. He’s developed what he calls “game theory” for every major decision: “What happens if I do this, if this succeeds? What’s the downside? What’s the upside? What’s the most likely? Where could this go wrong? Where could it go right? We spent a lot of time on that.”
Island’s Dallas- and Tel-Aviv-based team has achieved something remarkable in the fast-moving cybersecurity space: “Our build order — what was R&D supposed to build and what features would be needed — didn’t change for three and a half years.” While competitors pivoted constantly, Island’s engineering team built proper architectures instead of quick fixes, actually accelerating their feature development over time.
Fey’s most striking insight challenges the startup obsession with rapid decision-making: “I can’t tell you how many times I think there’s a decision to be made and you realize, no, there really isn’t. It looks like two different paths, but it’s the same decision at the end of the day.”
His discipline around reflection proves crucial: “You feel like you’ll get around to it, but you won’t. It’s like anything else, setting aside time to really think something through.” Fey schedules specific morning time for strategic thinking, understanding that without deliberate structure, urgent tasks will always crowd out important thinking.
The business results validate this approach: “I’m very proud that we’ve had less than 10 voluntary attritions at Island in our five years.”
Step 3: Spend Time With Your People
For Anshul Rathi, CEO of CertifyOS, the challenge is different but the principle holds. His healthcare technology company has scaled to 250 employees across two countries while solving one of the industry’s most complex problems: provider network management and compliance for health plans.
CertifyOS operates in a space where mistakes have serious consequences—incorrect provider credentialing can impact patient care and regulatory compliance. Yet Rathi has discovered that slowing down his decision-making process actually enables faster, more accurate execution across his distributed team.
“When I started I was in a very small town where I grew up and I realized that if I was not available on the EST time, I don’t think people would have that ownership. So I just worked on EST. 4pm to 4am would be my timings,” Rathi explains. This wasn’t about heroic availability—it was about building cultural infrastructure.
“People never feel that I’m out of the country, if at all,” Rathi notes. His willingness to adapt his schedule created an authentic connection that scales beyond his personal presence. “I just didn’t or still don’t take things for granted. And so to prove that I belong is, I think that also drives me a lot.”
This deliberate approach to relationship-building has enabled CertifyOS to maintain high performance standards while operating across time zones and cultures—crucial for a company where precision matters more than speed.
Step 4: Understand The Employee Journey
Deborah Hanus, CEO of Sparrow, built a company designed to automate employee leave management—essentially handling some of the most stressful moments in people’s lives. When employees go on medical or parental leave, Sparrow ensures they navigate complex state regulations and receive proper benefits.
Scaling from 10 to 250 employees during the pandemic while maintaining service quality required Hanus to develop what she calls “slowing down to speed up” philosophy.
“I spend a lot of time with our people ops team trying to think in advance what are the misconceptions that people might have and then to educate them around how we’re thinking about it in advance,” Hanus explains.
This proactive approach prevents the fire-fighting that consumes most scaling startups. Hanus references a case study where employees complained about lack of professional development, when they actually meant lack of promotions. “At which point they spent some time educating and working with people on what is the definition of professional development. And then the next time they ran their engagement survey and asked the same question, they had some huge bump. I think 98% of people said that they had good professional development.”
Her insight cuts to the core of scaling challenges: “If our team could successfully predict in advance every misconception and misunderstanding that people might have, I feel like we would have solved HR.” The investment in anticipating problems eliminates the need to solve them reactively.
Step 5: Develop Management Skills Before You Need Them
Back at FalconX, Leung faces the real-time test of these principles. In the white-hot crypto trading environment, where market opportunities can appear and disappear in hours, the temptation is to optimize for pure speed.
Instead, Leung has focused on building what she calls “effective conversation” capabilities throughout the organization. “At its core it’s how to have effective conversations and communication with their teams. And it’s not day to day tactical management. It’s giving effective feedback, effectively prioritizing, setting goals and just making sure that you have alignment.”
Her insight addresses a critical scaling bottleneck: “These are skills that frontline managers I don’t think intrinsically have and unless they’ve seen it done before, then they don’t know how to do it.”
In FalconX’s high-pressure environment, this deliberate investment in management capabilities prevents the communication breakdowns that typically accompany rapid scaling. “Making sure that folks have sort of the tools to communicate strategy plans, goals, have the tools to communicate feedback and have the tools to actually manage and hold their teams accountable,” Leung explains.
Step 6: Learn From Failure Before You Scale Success
Lee Hoffman, CEO of Runwise, embodies the paradox through hard-earned wisdom. His New York-based company has grown to manage energy systems in 10,000 buildings, cutting fossil fuel usage by an average of 21%. But Hoffman’s path to this success was paved with instructive failures that taught him the value of strategic patience.
“I’ve been building startups since I was 17, which gets you about 25 plus years, mostly failing for large parts of that,” Hoffman reflects. His early ventures included prescient ideas executed poorly—building web-based productivity software in 1998, years before Google Apps, but targeting Wall Street finance professionals who weren’t ready for cloud-based solutions.
“I was 18 or 17 at the time. And it was a very technically complex thing to build. And so I first started to just try to go raise money and knew nobody in startups. I just went to people on Wall Street because I lived in New York City,” Hoffman recalls. The mismatch between his revolutionary product and his target market’s readiness taught him a crucial lesson about timing and preparation.
Another venture—a social news platform that anticipated Facebook and Twitter—failed because Hoffman perfected the technology without validating the market. “I made every classic mistake in the book and basically over-perfect the pixels and the code for a year, blew through 80% of the money I’d raised from friends and family.”
These failures crystallized Hoffman’s current approach: “Now I don’t just pursue every next great idea. I try to do customer development. I try to validate the hypotheses baked into the idea with the minimum amount of time, energy and effort to de-risk as many of those variables as humanly possible.”
The transformation is striking. Instead of rushing to build, Hoffman now invests heavily in understanding: “I go into it knowing that probably 60 or 70% of the hypotheses baked into the idea are wrong. And so I have to figure that out and it just makes you a much better, much more efficient entrepreneur.”
The Compound Returns of Strategic Patience
These leaders have discovered something their frantically moving competitors miss: the quality of decision-making matters more than the speed of decision-making. Time invested in upfront thinking compounds into execution advantages that can’t be replicated through pure effort.
Allen’s pivot execution appeared rapid to external observers, but was preceded by months of careful groundwork. “Once I cleared the mental hurdle of the California retention and the help plan contracts, then everything else was operations and change management.”
The pattern reveals a sophisticated understanding of how preparation and execution relate. These CEOs aren’t slower—they’re more deliberate during calm periods so they can move faster during crisis periods.
As Allen reflects: “I had to actually go through thinking about the worst case scenario. And remind myself, that no matter what, I’d be okay.” The psychological preparation proved as crucial as the strategic analysis.
The paradox of pause reveals a deeper truth about scaling: the leaders who slow down their thinking speed up everything else. In a world obsessed with velocity, the most successful scaling companies are discovering that sometimes the fastest way forward is first taking time to think.
I write about AI and performance management for Forbes. I’m the founder of Mandala, an AI coaching platform for managers.