[menloparkbum]

The iPod was designed and manufactured in less than a year. It sold 125,000 units in the first month. That's his definition of a dud? Likewise, Google went from being a stanford research project to the best search engine in less than 3 years.

His premise is wrong and the article is an apologia for being slow. Every huge success on the web, and in the computing/internet sector in general has been the result of being better and faster than the competitors. 10 years is way too long. If you haven't succeeded in 2-4 years you are doing something wrong.

The trap: sprint all day and run out of energy before the marathon even starts.

Runners who win marathons can run all day at a pace most people would consider sprinting.

[netcan]

I think you need to take this in Seth's Audience's context. He is not writing for startups. He's writing for businesses.

Take Amazon (established 1994). It was a great success as a startup in 2-4 years (IPO in 97'). It got big fast. It made waves. It challenged the way the industry needed to work & it presented a net gain for the economy as a whole. It became profitable in 2001/2 (7-8 years). A reasonable definition of a successful business . By 2004 - 2008 (10 - 14 yrs) it's a stable business it is clearly here to stay. The elements of its strategy that made it successful in the second half of its life (the profitable one) are the slow & steady ones. Reliability, customer service, trustworthiness, customer goodwill, a long lived affiliate program...

But I agree, some of the examples he gave were probably not the best.

[sh1mmer]

I think his point about the iPod was it started out not turning the market around. See this sales graph from the Wikipeida iPod page (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/Ipod_sales_200...). It was almost 2 years after launch until the iPod sales really started to shift upwards significantly.

I think his point is that persistence is important. It's not about apologising for being slow, it's understanding that you need a certain social capital to become big in a market. That can take time.

[paul]

By what year was Google a "huge success"? Do you realize that they started working on it in 1996? (the company wasn't formed until late 98)

[menloparkbum]

Google was a huge success by the time it went out of beta. I think this was late 1999.

By 2004's IPO Google's success would be considered "the standard by which success will be defined for the next 20 years" type of huge success rather than merely another run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley $100M exit type of huge success.

[paul]

By what metric was it a huge success in 1999? They had a good product, but most people had never heard of the company. I remember having to explain that it was "kind of like Yahoo, but with good search and none of the other features", and they were always like, "well, good luck with that." (obviously thinking to themselves, "another stupid .com")

[netcan]

I wonder if Google realised before adwords started growing like wildfire that search was such a potentially powerful advertising platform.

I know that other pay per click & search marketing services were around and were reasonably successful, but a lot of that was probably hard to seperate from the bubble. I mean I don't think there were many plumbers advertising on search in 99' & coca cola was never going to work.

[steveplace]

Dude, you're arguing with Google employee #23. Unless you're last name is Page or Brin, I'd take his insight ;)

[ericwan]

They brought in no cash in 1999. (correct me if I'm wrong) How's it a success?

[jmtame]

If you want to look at a company like Google, at least mention that they're generating $16 billion in revenue a year. Yes, they took 10 years, but look at the power of their brand, all of the applications they've built and gotten into the marketplace, plus all of their revenue. They're also "the best place to work at" (so you know they're doing a lot more than just product development). Google isn't just a search company anymore, and that's not what they've been spending all of their time doing since 1996.

10 years? You better have something extremely impressive if you're given THAT much time.

How did this get so many votes up? Is the HN community getting soft or what? ;) (I can sense the massive downvotes on this response already)

[ericwan]

Not gonna down mod you coz you've given thoughts to it.

Yet, your argument is inline with what the article says. It took Google 10 years for them to become a HUGE success. During this 10 years they probably have worked really hard everyday, and they're all brilliant people. For less talented people it probably takes even longer.

I guess your point is if you're just gonna do a declicious-scale success it doesn't take that long. YouTube even just took a year. But look at how much experience they have under their belt before that. It really depends on where you start counting that 10 years.

The article doesn't specify either, though. It's kind of vague.

[steveplace]

How did this get so many votes up?

Look at his page on Wikipedia.

[skmurphy]

The original iPod was an outside design. MP3 players had existed for several years. The initial perception was that it was a dud. See for example http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&#3... "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

But they did keep at it, and the iTunes app was a much the innovation as the iPod.

My take is that as a small player you have to be strategic. Not everything that you try (your tactics) will succeed. As to how long a new technology takes, it's worth reading "The Long Nose of Innovation" http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2008/id20080... on how long an invention takes to become a successful product. Ten years is a reasonable time frame. Google and Apple built on considerable earlier work. Google's money making innovation was their advertising model, without that having the best search engine technology might not have allowed them to prosper.

[jmtame]

Every huge success on the web...has been the result of being better and faster than the competitors.

100% true. You can take 10 years to build whatever you want, but you're going to have to learn to put in the hours if you really want something in the next 1-4 years. You hear about companies like PayPal doing an IPO in 4-5 years (and right after 9/11), but you don't realize that their engineering teams were pushed by Levchin, who works--and expects his team to work--15+ hour days and weekends. Intense? Yes. But most of those early PayPal engineers walked away with enough to buy their next house in cash and comfortably work on whatever else they wanted, like YouTube. The 2 engineers and the UI guy that did YouTube also probably brought with them the intense work ethic that allowed them to move as quickly as they did.

If you want a 1-4 year startup, then you're going to have to start making sacrifices. If not, other people out there are going to do it and you'll take the back seat, or spend 10 years creating what took someone else 2.