By what year was Google a "huge success"? Do you realize that they started working on it in 1996? (the company wasn't formed until late 98)
By 2004's IPO Google's success would be considered "the standard by which success will be defined for the next 20 years" type of huge success rather than merely another run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley $100M exit type of huge success.
I know that other pay per click & search marketing services were around and were reasonably successful, but a lot of that was probably hard to seperate from the bubble. I mean I don't think there were many plumbers advertising on search in 99' & coca cola was never going to work.
10 years? You better have something extremely impressive if you're given THAT much time.
How did this get so many votes up? Is the HN community getting soft or what? ;) (I can sense the massive downvotes on this response already)
Yet, your argument is inline with what the article says. It took Google 10 years for them to become a HUGE success. During this 10 years they probably have worked really hard everyday, and they're all brilliant people. For less talented people it probably takes even longer.
I guess your point is if you're just gonna do a declicious-scale success it doesn't take that long. YouTube even just took a year. But look at how much experience they have under their belt before that. It really depends on where you start counting that 10 years.
The article doesn't specify either, though. It's kind of vague.
Look at his page on Wikipedia.