| Greg isn't a founder of stripe. Larry and Sergey have been working on Google for 17 years. Mark has been working on Facebook for 11. Drew and Arash have now been working on Dropbox for 8 years. Brian, Nate, and Joe have been working on Airbnb for 7 years. Things change, of course, and you shouldn't work on a company that isn't working for 10 years. But I think it's a reasonable question to ask. If you go into something with a plan to do it for only a couple of years, you are unlikely to create anything important. I don't buy public or private equities I don't want to hold for 10 years (I have held some Apple shares 17 years now!), and I don't do jobs I can't see myself doing for 10 years (I ran my company, which was an ok but certainly not huge success, for 7+ years). I think more people would benefit from taking a long-term view on where they decide to spend their time and money--it's a really useful way to think about opportunity. |
One of the benefits of the long term view is that it forces you to address sustainability, so you focus on real revenue.
Our startup is now 6 years old. We decided early on that chasing funding meant focussing on the wrong thing, and that we would suck up the pain of little income and slower growth. Being able to focus on the product instead of investors was great, but that slower growth also turned out to be healthy. It meant a better relationship with our first customers, which lead to more useful feedback, a better product, and organic growth that this year will give me 4 times the best salary I ever earned before.
And it's still fun - as well as the financial compensation, we still control 100% of the company so we can do things our own way. We employed one of our support people in a city hit by a devastating earthquake; we carried an agent for a few months while she escaped an abusive marriage; we make a sizeable donation to a kids' charity in lieu of sending out Christmas cards.