Timing Lessons

Great post, but as a side note:<p><pre><code> "Twitter has 145m users in the same way @MikeTyson has $400m in career earnings." </code></pre> <a href="http://twitter.com/AndySwan/status/22880346280" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/AndySwan/status/22880346280</a>

&#62; Surrounding yourself with smart people you like to work with helps immeasurably.<p>I think this is one of the most important pieces of advice ever. Not many people are solo savants - almost everyone who is successful (in business, academia, life) is surrounded by other competent, like-minded people. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, and the romantic meme of the lone-wolf superstar maverick needs to be put away.

"Overnight success takes a long time." Paul Buchheit<p><a href="http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight-success-takes-long-time.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight-success-t...</a>

"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success."<p>Love this.

Joel Spolsky (2001):<p>"Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it."<p>- <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html</a>

I'm having a hard time understanding why he thinks Xanga wasn't a success. He worked on Blogger as well, both of those sites are huge still, maybe not Twitter huge but they are big.

It's good to hear a "Sometimes things take time" point of view. The typical mental model of YC [1] can make one feel less than perfect for not having raised $5M by 19, made multiple angel investments by 22, then traveled around the world for philanthropy during your mid 20s because now, carefully managed, you're set for life.<p>[1]: How the press likes to portray YC: get unknown kids, accelerate them towards terminal funding velocity, stir for three years, and <i>bam</i> instant millionaires.

while I can't say I personally admire twitter as a business, I have some serious respect for his message: 10 years of hard work make an overnight success.

I am glad that he purposefully calls out the balance between perseverance and a seemingly overnight success. This balance (or differentiation) is quite significant for anyone who is starting off. A week on TC and one would assume that raising money and releasing products is a matter of weeks if not days. But all good things (including wine) takes time to blosom.<p>Back to hardwork.com

I also like how his tale shows a progression over time in startup ideas that almost kept getting simpler and easier with each new iteration. The core feature(s) of Twitter is pretty darn simple to build out -- scaling it up is harder, sure, but that's a Maserati problem and the kind you may never have the privilege of having anyway. But it was a neat idea, they executed it, nailed it well, and lots of other people loved it. The lesson here with them is you don't have to build something that's very big or hard or complicated, you just have to build something people want and ideally love and tell their friends about it so you don't have to advertise -- if people learn by word-of-mouth your cost-of-customer acquisition approaches zero.

Very interesting! Its great to know that it takes years/decades to get to systems like Twitter. The media makes it look so much like a "it-happened-overnight" story.

Twitter's real founding story. The not so famous version.<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/How-did-Jack-Dorsey-Ev-William-and-Biz-Stone-split-up-the-equity-on-Twitter-when-they-restructured-Twitter-post-Odeo#ans95282" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/How-did-Jack-Dorsey-Ev-Willia...</a>

More specifically, it seems you have to do basically the same project for 10 years too.

Er, he personally launched Xanga? I think not from what I have read elsewhere.<p>More like he learned how to code/design from being given work to do on Xanga.<p>Rewriting history there eh?

It's called luck