

Timing Lessons - dabent
http://www.bizstone.com/2010/09/timing-lessons.html

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ivankirigin
Great post, but as a side note:

    
    
      "Twitter has 145m users in the same way @MikeTyson has $400m in career earnings."
    

<http://twitter.com/AndySwan/status/22880346280>

~~~
jiganti
Yeah I was wondering about this, surely they didn't have 145 million "users"
as in "created accounts", which is typically the definition. I imagine someone
who checked the website once is part of their "user" tally.

~~~
ivankirigin
Twitter has been quoted claiming 176M unique visitors a few months ago. That
stat makes sense for a site like nytimes.com, but not for a social network.
The number of active users is close to a standard in the industry. When
Facebook says it has 500M+ users, they mean people who have accounts and have
visited the site in the last 30 days.

Thing is that everyone knows the right stats to publish. They only use 145M
because is sounds better than (the more likely) 70M active. This doesn't come
as a coincidence as Twitter is trying to start selling ads. Attractiveness to
advertisers is directly proportional to audience size.

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narkee
> Surrounding yourself with smart people you like to work with helps
> immeasurably.

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.

~~~
dotcoma
it makes setbacks tolerable, and day to day toiling a pleasure.

~~~
bluishgreen
Not just on an emotional level, I think when a bunch of clever people get
together a sort of super brain is formed which is greater than each of them.

This is so since the super brain has the combined knowledge but not the
combined biases of the individuals. To give an analogue this is like these
comment threads where knowledge gets added and incorrect statements promptly
and strongly refuted, but on a much much higher resolution when you work with
a smart person face to face for a considerable length of time.

~~~
mkramlich
I think if you were to plot it as a graph it has a curve though.

Sure adding that 2nd smart person, the 8th smart person, etc., can add benefit
and yield a whole which is greater than the sum of the individual parts in
isolation. But once you are in the organization size range where you're adding
a 500th person, a 10,000th person, then the organization almost always takes
on other qualities and conditions: bureaucracy, slowing down, middle
management, rules, paperwork, gossip, insulation from consumers/competition,
groupthink, aversion to risk, and so on. And these qualities dumb it down. The
"group brain" becomes much dumber than a smart brain when left alone and
unfettered as an individual.

Google is a bit of an exceptional case where despite having on the OOM of 20k
employees they don't seem to have quite succumbed to Big Dumb Company-itis.
Surely they have some aspects of it, but they've tried hard to fight it and
stay like a smaller/younger org.

I once dealt with a startup that was around 12 people and already I could see
symptoms of Big Dumb Company start to manifest themselves.

------
prs
"Overnight success takes a long time." Paul Buchheit

[http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight-
success-t...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight-success-
takes-long-time.html)

~~~
mkramlich
I like that quote/notion too.

However, I don't think the time aspect of his success story is about an
overnight success taking 10 years as much as it is about refining one's
product & market acumen over time, combined with having the luck to put
something on the market (micro-blogging service) at just the right timing when
a lot of people are ready for it (traditional blogging had become mainstream,
but also lots of bloggers had become dissatisfied with the ROI and/or blog
readers were looking for smaller/easier things to read and/or with more
frequent updates AND smart phones were taking off with full web access on the
go).

Enter Twitter. They executed well, but I think they _also_ had very lucky
timing.

------
Calamitous
"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look
like an overnight success."

Love this.

------
atlei
Joel Spolsky (2001):

"Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it."

\- <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html>

------
sosuke
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.

~~~
dotcoma
does he say it wasn't a success?

~~~
sosuke
That's true he doesn't say they weren't successes explicitly. He does say that
it took 10 years to make you look like a succes in the last paragraph which I
understood as the other sites not being successes to him.

~~~
dotcoma
well, with all due respect, you're not king of the world if you're the founder
or co-founder of Xanga :)

------
seiji
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.

[1]: How the press likes to portray YC: get unknown kids, accelerate them
towards terminal funding velocity, stir for three years, and _bam_ instant
millionaires.

------
karanbhangui
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.

------
0xygen
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.

Back to hardwork.com

------
mkramlich
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.

------
wicknicks
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.

------
myprasanna
Twitter's real founding story. The not so famous version.

[http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/How-did-Jack-Dorsey-Ev-
Willia...](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)

------
s3graham
More specifically, it seems you have to do basically the same project for 10
years too.

~~~
s3graham
(wasn't intended to be snarky, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing
the same project for 10 years. That's how long it takes to hit the home run.
Maybe the whole "10,000 hours" thing is more finely targeted than people
initially assume)

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ck2
Er, he personally launched Xanga? I think not from what I have read elsewhere.

More like he learned how to code/design from being given work to do on Xanga.

Rewriting history there eh?

------
growl
It's called luck

~~~
johnrob
True. But skill also. Luck let's you roll a 6 if you need one. Skill makes
sure you get to the roll the die 10 times.

~~~
j-g-faustus
Skill and perseverance.

A "lucky break" is more likely to come along if you keep at it for a decade
than if you give up after the first non-successful year.

I think skill comes in two forms: The skill of making something that people
want to use, but also the skill of recognizing and making the most out of
"lucky breaks".

