More specifically, winning often means being last. Case in point: Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo!, Infoseek... then Google. Let others rush around doing your prototyping.
Only partly true. Look more carefully. Page and Brin devised their product as a response to other search engines—-which they couldn’t have done by rushing into search engines. For them, given their ages, their timing was probably happy accident. Still, why not imitate successful accident?