long-term thinking
musings on long-term thinking in a shortsighted world. we overestimate what we can do in a year, underestimate what we can do in 10 kinda thing.
Juan Orbea and
long-term thinking
MuleSoft, acquired for $6.5B in 2018:
- Took 6 years to reach $10M revenue
- Revenue grew less than 100% every year except 1
- Burned $7M to go from $110M to $188M revenue
- Burned $4M to go from $188M to $297M revenue
Efficient growth is highly... See more
Chetan Puttaguntatwitter.com
“Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.”
Polina Marinova • The Profile Dossier: Ed Catmull, Pixar's Creative Genius
That's another thing too, where I'm only interested in people that do things for a long period of time. There is a subset of people that can start a great business or be a great investor for two years, five years, 10 years. I'm interested in people that, you started the conversation saying about Edwin Land and Estee Lauder. Okay. Two obsessives.... See more
Patrick O'Shaughnessy • Passion & Pain
A league with 30 intense competitors requires a culture of finding new, better ways to solve repeating problems. In the short term, investing in that sort of innovation often doesn’t look like much progress, if any. Abraham Lincoln said “give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
SAM H INKIE 3 6 0 1 S O U T H B R O A D S T R E E T
It took 4.5 years and ~$1bn raised for OpenAI to launch GPT-3, which was their first PMF product.
That breaks every “rule” in the startup world, around mvp and being capital light pre-pmf.
Goes to show you that you have to define your own rules to get outsized success.
immadtwitter.comEverything takes longer than you think.
The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough--the problem is your expectations were never realistic to begin with.
Every few years, someone discovers a marketing channel that works unusually well. They write about it. Other people copy it. The channel gets crowded. The platform that hosts the channel notices the activity and starts charging for access. The channel’s effectiveness declines. Everyone moves on to the next channel. This cycle has been running since... See more