Sequencing bets in year three
The first two years are about staying alive. Year three is about deciding which bets are worth being slower for.
There is a particular flavour of mistake that happens in year three. You have survived the early death valley. The product is real. The team is real. The numbers are good enough that someone has handed you a Series B term sheet without you having to grovel for it.
And now, for the first time, you have a choice that is not survival-shaped. You have the option of being slower. You have the option of running three bets instead of one. You have the option of being wrong on purpose, in a controlled way, in pursuit of a bigger thing.
Most year-three founders make the same mistake, which is to take that option and immediately treat it like the old option. They run three bets at the urgency of one. They treat slack as a problem to be solved instead of a resource to be deployed. They burn the new optionality the moment they get it.
Sequencing is the strategy
The actual question in year three is not “which bets”. The question is “in what order, with what overlap, at what cost to the current thing”. That is a sequencing problem. Sequencing problems are unsexy and they reward the founders who can sit with ambiguity for an extra quarter.