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Comment by taphangum | Hacker News Reader

We live in a different world now, a world that moves VERY fast. In a world like this, IMpatience is a virtue. It's the only way your gonna keep up!

This may be a terrible illustration of my point but let's have a look:

Entrepreneurs time to a $1bn net worth.

Steve Jobs - 20 years?

Mark Zuckerberg - 3 years.

Andrew Mason - 1 year! (maybe 1 and a half)

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Apple was undoubtedly a huge success long before then. Every school in the country had Apple IIes in the 1980s.

I think you need to accounting for inflation and the growth of the electronics market in general.

Yes, it is a bit of a vague example. But i think it still shows my point.

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak on April 1, 1976. Apple went public in December of 1980, roughly 3.5 years later, in the most successful IPO since the Ford Motor Company.

Is this really due to impatience though? You've picked the cream of the crop to make your point, but arguably I'd say these guys were visionaries that stuck to their guns (skated to where the puck was going) more than they were impatient. If anything, they were very patient to let the world catch up to their ideas.

I would agree that with Zuckerberg, that is probably the case. Andrew Mason however, had only been doing ThePoint for a year before he decided to pivot to groupon.

I am pretty sure it took Steve Jobs a lot less than 20 years to become a billionaire (pre-NeXT era).

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