Move Fast and Break Things
The philosophy almost nobody actually understands.
Move fast and break things.
I was never a big fan of Mr.Zuck, but I really get it.
You’ve heard it a thousand times. Probably rolled your eyes at it. Maybe dismissed it as Silicon Valley ego masquerading as wisdom.
The phrase has been weaponized by every tech bro who shipped garbage and called it “iteration.” By every startup that broke user trust and called it “disruption.” By Facebook itself, which broke democracy and called it “connecting the world.”
But here’s the thing.
The criticism of the manifesto is valid. The manifesto itself is still right.
We just forgot what it actually means.
The Original Intent
Mark Zuckerberg wrote this in his 2012 letter to investors:
“We have a saying: Move fast and break things. The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.”
Read that again.
He didn’t say “break people.” He didn’t say “break laws.” He didn’t say “break trust.”
He said break things. Code. Systems. Assumptions. The status quo.
The philosophy was about internal processes. About engineering culture. About choosing speed of learning over perfection of execution.
A younger Zuckerberg once explained it even more directly:
“It’s more useful to make things happen and apologize later than to make sure you dot all your i’s now and just not get stuff done.”
This wasn’t about ethics. This was about bureaucracy.
The enemy wasn’t users. The enemy was slowness.
Why It Got Abandoned
Facebook officially retired the motto in 2014.
The new slogan? “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”
Sounds responsible. Sounds mature.
Also sounds like every other company that got big, got scared, and stopped shipping.
Here’s what actually happened: Facebook broke things that mattered. User privacy. Election integrity. Mental health. They moved fast in directions that should have required moving slowly.
The problem wasn’t the philosophy. The problem was applying it to the wrong domains.
Moving fast makes sense for product features. Moving fast makes sense for internal tools. Moving fast makes sense for experiments with low blast radius.
Moving fast doesn’t make sense for data handling that affects billions. Moving fast doesn’t make sense for algorithms that shape public discourse. Moving fast doesn’t make sense for decisions with irreversible consequences.
Facebook confused “move fast” with “don’t think.”
That’s not the same thing.
What Everyone Overlooks
The manifesto has a hidden layer that nobody talks about.
Breaking things requires knowing what you broke.
This is the part that gets skipped. The unglamorous sequel.
Moving fast means shipping. But shipping without measurement is just chaos. The whole point is that breaking things teaches you faster than avoiding breaks.
Think about it like this:
If you’re learning guitar and you never hit a wrong note, you’re either a prodigy or you’re not actually trying new things.
Wrong notes aren’t the problem. Not noticing wrong notes is the problem.
Facebook’s failure wasn’t moving fast. Their failure was not having feedback loops for the things that actually mattered. They measured engagement religiously. They measured societal harm almost never.
Move fast and know what you broke.
That’s the complete philosophy.
Why This Matters More in 2026 Than Ever
Here’s the contrarian take nobody wants to hear.
The AI era is the most “move fast and break things” moment in technology history. And the people who win will be the ones who actually understand the philosophy, not the ones who abandoned it because Facebook gave it a bad name.
Why?
The cost of experimentation has collapsed.
Two years ago, building a product required months of development, significant capital, and specialized teams.
Today? You can prototype in a weekend. Ship in a week. Get real user feedback before most companies finish their planning documents.
The gap between “idea” and “testable product” has never been smaller.
This fundamentally changes the math.
When building is expensive, planning extensively makes sense. You can’t afford to be wrong.
When building is cheap, shipping beats planning. You can afford to be wrong a dozen times.
The VCs are already seeing this. Investors at GeekWire noted it plainly:
“2026 is going to be an incredible moment to build. The cost of experimentation and building products has collapsed, and founders no longer need educational credentials to create real products and revenue.”
The era of permission is over. The era of iteration is here.
The New Playbook
So how do you actually apply “move fast and break things” in 2026 without becoming another cautionary tale?
1. Define your blast radius.
Before you ship anything, ask: “If this breaks badly, what’s the worst case?”
Feature experiment fails → Users see an error, you learn something. Low blast radius.
Payment processing breaks → Users lose money, trust evaporates. High blast radius.
Algorithm change affects mental health → Societal harm. Maximum blast radius.
Move fast on low blast radius items. Move slow on high blast radius items. This isn’t complicated. Facebook just pretended everything was low blast radius.
2. Build feedback loops before you need them.
Don’t wait until something breaks to figure out how you’ll know.
What metrics tell you something’s wrong?
How fast will you see the signal?
Who’s responsible for watching?
The best companies ship fast because they detect problems fast. Speed without visibility is just recklessness.
3. Embrace the 10-50-500 Rule.
Most people underestimate how many iterations real quality requires.
10 attempts for a decent first draft
50 attempts for something genuinely good
500 attempts for excellence
AI tools make this possible at scale. You can generate, test, and refine faster than any previous generation of builders.
But only if you actually iterate. Most people stop at attempt 3.
4. Break assumptions, not commitments.
The things worth breaking:
Industry “best practices” that nobody questioned
Internal processes that exist because “we’ve always done it this way”
Technical constraints that were real last year but aren’t anymore
The things not worth breaking:
Promises to customers
Regulatory requirements
Trust relationships
Breaking the first category accelerates you. Breaking the second category destroys you.
5. Ship to learn, not to launch.
The old mental model: Development → Launch → Success/Failure
The new mental model: Ship → Learn → Iterate → Ship → Learn → Iterate
Every release is an experiment. Every experiment generates data. Data compounds into insight.
This only works if you actually ship. You can’t learn from hypotheticals.
The Window Is Open
Here’s what I see in 2026 and 2027:
The cautious companies are getting killed.
Enterprises spent 2025 running AI pilots. Endless proofs of concept. Careful evaluation frameworks.
Meanwhile, smaller teams shipped actual products, got actual users, gathered actual feedback, and iterated faster than the evaluation committees could schedule their next meeting.
The analysis paralysis tax has never been higher.
The fast companies are separating.
Anthropic went from $1 billion to $7 billion in revenue in one year. AI startups are scaling 5x faster than SaaS companies ever did.
This isn’t luck. This is what happens when you ship relentlessly and learn from what breaks.
The window for builders is enormous.
If you’ve been waiting for the “right time” to build something, it was 2024. The second best time is now.
The tools exist. The distribution channels exist. The capital exists.
The only thing missing is your willingness to move fast, break things, and actually pay attention to what broke.
The Real Risk
Everyone asks: “What if I move too fast and break something important?”
Nobody asks the more dangerous question: “What if I move too slow and nothing breaks because nothing happened?”
Mediocre companies break nothing because they ship nothing.
They’re so afraid of the wrong kind of failure that they never experience the right kind.
The right kind teaches you. The wrong kind destroys you. The absence of either means you’re not actually in the game.
I’d rather break things and learn than preserve things and stagnate.
That’s not recklessness. That’s the only strategy that works when the entire technology landscape is being rebuilt in real time.
Move fast.
Break things.
Just make sure you’re breaking the right things.
And paying attention when you do.
Post-Credit Scene
📖 “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries – The intellectual foundation for “build-measure-learn.” Published in 2011, still the clearest explanation of why shipping beats planning. If you haven’t read it, now’s the time.
🎧 “Founders” Podcast #14: The Founding of Facebook – David Senra’s deep dive into Mark Zuckerberg’s early years based on “The Accidental Billionaires.” Better context than any business school case study on what “move fast” actually looked like in practice.
🎬 “The Social Network” (2010)
Yes, again. Watch it now through the lens of “move fast and break things” and notice what actually got broken. The movie was a warning disguised as admiration.
📖 “Move Fast and Break Things” by Jonathan Taplin – The critical counter-perspective. How the philosophy got weaponized by Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Worth reading so you understand the valid criticisms, not so you abandon the valid parts.
🎧 “Acquired” Podcast: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang – How Jensen Huang built a company by betting the future and shipping relentlessly. “Move fast” applied to hardware, which is much harder than software. His quote: “My will to survive exceeds almost everybody else’s will to kill me.”
Thanks for reading
Vlad