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Microessay about how things take time by Justin Duke

https://x.com/jmduke/status/1788307295526338883

Things take time.

• Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation - Yamamuchi Nintendo & Co., LTD - was established nearly fifty years later, in 1933. They spent forty years selling playing cards, then another decade operating merely as a distributor of electronics before coming out with their first piece of electronic hardware.

• The Lego Group began in a Danish workshop in 1932; it took them 26 years until a confluence of technology, iteration, and luck led them to what we now refer to as a Lego. (Er, sorry - a Lego brick.)

• Nike spent eight years merely re-selling (literally, not figuratively) Onitsuka shoes to a U.S. audience.

• Gates and Allen ran Microsoft as what was essentially a freelance firm for eight years, too, before scoring a contract with IBM (and even that took an additional two years to be parlayed into MSDOS.)

(There are, of course, some companies that like Athena sprout fully-formed from the head of their creators - Amazon and TSMC come to mind.)

When we build hagiographies of the companies we love (or at least find most interesting), it can be tempting to draw clean, neat, satisfying arcs and fast forward through the boring eras that do not inform our modern understanding of those organizations.

But neither the Nike Cortez nor the Lego System 236 Garage with Automatic Door came from the first decade of either company's existence.

Part of success is staying alive long enough to have the right kinds of things happen to you all at once.