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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
As the saying goes, great minds ...
Of course, I might be wrong :-)
So then wouldn't his argument be true by definition?
I wonder how many people doing startups are prepared for success to take ten years.
On an even shorter time frame: once you get to the point that you're enjoying what you're doing, the only one who can stop you is yourself.
Anyway, it's an interesting path to the ten years. Maybe you've just (http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html) got a bad idea that's not worth hanging on for ten years as it'll always suck. Probably an early milestone is to get (http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html) ramen profitable. If you can't get there in n years, reboot (?) Maybe (http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html) some comp sci phd angel/vc former founder will figure out the algorithm to optimize the ten years to reduce it by an order of magnitude.
This essay was good, but I thought Ira Glass presented a related idea in a much more powerful way here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE. Depending on where you are in your career/startup/creative life, this 5 minute clip of Ira Glass could be the most important thing you watch all year.
Your friend's tactic can be to produce within a year something that either has enough revenue to carry itself further (not easy ;) or that shows enough promise to raise a second round on.
If I understand Godin, he warns against a tactic of trying to sell the company within that year. It happened before, but as a plan it's like moving to Hollywood with a strategic goal to become a film star within a year.
