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Comment by tom_b | Hacker News Reader

It boggles my mind that you say the average HNer could do this in 6 weeks. Not in a "I don't believe you sense" but rather in a "that's so outside of my mindset that it doesn't compute."

And this is coming from someone who remembers reading stuff from you on Joel's Business of Software forums, so it's not like I haven't seen the full path from BCC to consulting to AppointmentReminder . . .

Personally, I fall into the trap of thinking, oh, I couldn't do that unless I master <insert obscure tech at the Knuth level here>. Which is clearly just not the differentiating skill here . . .

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Are you a younger adult? One thing that may surprise you with a decade or so behind you is how much of the big stuff was only ever a few solid weeks of pushing away.

Building and running a company worth lots of money when we sold it, yes, took 8 years. But getting the company into the right trajectory to do that --- fits and starts, blind alleys aside --- was nothing like that much work.

Some things take "10,000 hours" to get good at, but a lot of really valuable stuff takes more like 100.

I'm actually older than most HN'ers. But a bit of a "late-bloomer" to being paid as a hacker.

Just didn't ever know that entrepreneurship was an actual option for people. Coming from a risk-averse and somewhat fatalistic family/peer group wrt work/career control hasn't helped.

One of the best parts of HN is actually reading contributions from people like you and Patrick that break down what are frankly self-limiting thought patterns.

Isn't the fits & starts & blind alleys the actual work involved in getting the company onto the right trajectory? Empirically, the vast majority of time spent in startups is in that category, and if someone has figured out a way to reduce the time, you'd think they'd be rich by now. (Okay, you could argue that YC is a good example of an organization trying to systematically reduce the time spent getting a company on a breakout trajectory, and they are getting rich off it. But even then, a majority of YC startups never make it.)

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