SPECIAL: A Breakdown On Why Most Startups Take Longer Than You Think To Build (with examples)

Most people underestimate what they can do in 10 years. I've always been obsessed with time. I've thought about that quote for a while. I've always been obsessed with, can you get done 10 years worth of work in 6 months? What would happen if you dedicated 50 years to something instead of 3 to 5 years or however long a lot of people look at, uh, the typical time it takes to start a company. And in today's episode, I'm going to do something a little experimental. I'm going to go over examples of people who took longer than you thought to start something, why that matters, why you should do the same. But also, I'm going to give you very specific tactics and strategies for dealing with going through a, a long time, going through that that period where you're just getting something going and it stinks for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years. I'm going to show you examples of people who dealt with that and how to actually get through that. This episode, it's an experiment. I threw this together because I study this on my own. And if you like it, let me know. My Twitter handle's @TheSamParr and I'll do some more. But let's get into this first one. And actually, before we do this podcast, I'm not, I'm not here to tell you not to start something or not to do a project. Instead, I'm here to convince you that it is likely going to take longer than you think to start your business, to, um, well, accomplish most goals. I think it takes longer than you, than you might think. And that is okay. I'm not trying to tell you not to do it. I'm trying to tell you the exact opposite. I'm trying to tell you to do it. I'm just trying to normalize that instead of having a 6-month plan, I think you should still have that, but you should also have perhaps a 10-year plan. And in my line of work, in my own life, you know, I, because we host HustleCon and because we have this podcast, I see a lot of people who have multi-billion dollar companies who are by traditional standards successful financially at least. And when you do something for years, it really builds up, but it just doesn't feel like that. And I want this podcast to show you what the things that you likely admire, or at least the people I admire, what it was like earlier on and how it seemed like the same hell that you're going through and how things just take time to do. And so I want to normalize things taking a long time. Things that succeed often they succeed slowly and then it feels like it's all happening all at once. And I'm going to show you examples of that. Admittedly, a lot of my examples are tech companies and, and we're talking 5 or 10 year span sometimes. I think that's even too short. I think I can show you a lot of examples of companies taking 50, 60, 100 years, which is great as well. But a lot of my audience is tech folks, so we're going to start there. And so we're going to get into some really fascinating stories. The first story is about Tim Westergen, the founder of Pandora, the music streaming service. They were one of the first apps on the iPhone. They recently sold a couple years ago for like $3 or $4 billion. It was quite big. It was a publicly traded company that made hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars a year in revenue. Very successful. Tim, in 2015, spoke at my event, HustleCon, which if you Google Pandora HustleCon, you could find this whole talk. And he told the story about starting the company and it's incredibly fascinating. So Pandora became quite popular in around 2005, 2006. Most people don't know is that the idea of Pandora, Tim started working on that in about 1998. And then in the year 2000, he raised a little bit of seed money and he started the company. And what they did at first was they hired a whole bunch of part-time musicians and they would go through and listen to hundreds and then eventually thousands of songs and they would assign attributes to those songs. And he created a pretty large database. I believe it was just on Excel at first, and they would assign attributes to a song, and then you could listen to a song or tell this database the song that you like, and it would pop up with a variety of other songs that are very similar to that first song. And that's how it started, except it didn't work for like 6 years. So he started working on it in 2000 or 1998, raised money in year 2000, They hired all these people and then eventually after 2 years of raising that money, they ran out of money. And Tim actually had to convince his team to work without pay for 2 years, which is hell. And in this story, I'm going to play a story or a clip about Tim explaining what that was like. But then also at the end of this podcast, I'm going to show you the speech that he gave. I have a recording of that speech that he gave to employees to encourage them to keep going, and it's pretty moving. So let's listen to this first story by Tim Westergen from Pandora.

So we kind of forged ahead, kept analyzing more songs and sort of refining the front end to this matching engine. This was now 2001 though, and everything had gone to hell in a handbasket. The dot-com boom had collapsed. The music industry was in complete shambles. Napster was at its apex. Uh, and in our first efforts to go raise money, um, it was pretty clear that was not going to be easy to do. And so realizing we were going to have to make our money last, we began asking our employees in the course of 2001 to work for an ever smaller share of their salary, uh, until by the end of 2001, we weren't paying employees at all. We called that salary deferral, uh, back then. Which incidentally is illegal in California apparently. We couldn't afford an attorney though. We had no idea that we were breaking the law. And ultimately, we had 50 people work without salary for over 2 years to keep this thing going. And we managed to make it through the whole dot-com valley by essentially, you know, this group of people that sort of hung in there. By the end of 2003, I had 11 maxed-out credit cards. I think I owed like half a million dollars of personal debt. And we owed close to $2 million of back salary to all these employees, 5 of whom were actually suing us for having done that. I also had a personal obligation for 5 years on a large commercial office space in Oakland. And I was a musician, so it wasn't like if it didn't work out, I'd go back to my lucrative band days and pay it all back quickly. It was going to be Mexico for me, for sure. We, we hung in there. And eventually, after I pitched Pandora 348 times, I found a Series B investor in 2004, March of '04, raised a $9 million round, which I still don't quite know how it happened. Um, and we paid out $2 million of salary that day.

So this was a minute-long clip. So it's easy to think that, that, uh, well, it was only a minute-long clip, but he's talking about 6, 7 years of his life. And it sounds easy, but just think about that. That's college plus some, that's an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree of being incredibly broke, of having to convince people on a regular basis that they should work without a salary, having to give this pitch. He said he pitched 360 VCs, was constantly turned down. It was a hard journey. And add that hard journey, but do it for like 5 years. It's crazy how long things, things take. Next, we're gonna talk about Webflow. Webflow is a website builder, but it does way more than that. But that's kind of the gist of it. And they're worth something like $2.5 billion. It's a wildly successful company. They make likely hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, and it's a really fascinating company. And its founder, his name is Vlad. In 2019, he tweeted something that I've never forgotten, and he talks about his journey to starting his company. So listen to this. So the company officially, or the iteration that, or the type of the business that it is now, launched in 2014, he actually started working on this as an idea and then like actually started working on it actively, like quit his job and working on it in 2004, but it didn't really notice any traction until 2014. Listen to this. He tweeted this out, and if you Google Vlad Webflow Twitter journey, you'll find this. 2004, it's just a list of, it's like a bullet pointed list of his journey. Listen. 2004, idea. 2005, first try, fail. 2006, married. 2007, second try, fail. 2008, third try, fail. 2009, kid number one. 2010, day job. 2011, kid number two. 2012, fourth try, YC, which is Y Combinator, an incubator, says no. 2013, YC says yes, we get funding. 2014, hard work begins. Very fascinating, uh, story. And I went and found a 1-minute clip where Vlad is on Jason Calcanis's, uh, podcast. It's called This Week in Startups. Listen to Vlad explaining that journey of building and how long it took and what, what he had to go through. Check this out.

All different entities, different co-founders. First two were just by myself. Second one was different co-founders, one of whom is actually working at Webflow now. Great. This last time, hopefully last time, last and final time, was started in late 2012. And that's around the time where, so same co-founders as now, one of them is my brother, one of them is a good friend of mine, co-worker at Intuit. That's when I almost went bankrupt and the company went bankrupt. Wow. Because we first wanted to just bootstrap. We wanted to do a Kickstarter campaign and I only had like 3 months of family runway to like invest in the company. It ended up— so I kind of promised my wife like, "Oh, we're going to get funding within—" No problem. Yeah, of course. I mean, not a big deal. Leave this, you know, well-paying job and just do the startup thing. But then we ended up going, more than 12 months without funding. Oh, wow. So that's where, and my— On fumes. On fumes. And my daughter ended up having a really like critical surgery and it was like catastrophic health insurance. And so we almost, uh, kind of fizzled out about 6 months after founding. Wow. Um, this was like pre-Y Combinator, uh, pre-funding and everything. We were like about ready to give up, go back to our jobs.

Check it out. People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing, and it's totally true. And the reason is, is because it's so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. It's really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don't love it, If you're not having fun doing it, you don't really love it, you're gonna give up. And that's what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up, you know, being "successful" in the eyes of society, and the ones that didn't, oftentimes it's the ones that are successful loved what they did, so they could persevere when, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn't love it quit.

So he talks about passion. You have to care about what you're doing. I believe that to be true, but I think that there's a twist here. When a lot of people hear this, they think you actually have to care about the product that you're making. So if you work in technology, if you work at— if you started Airbnb, you probably should care about travel or helping people with extra space make money. I think you should, or at least I think that's one strategy. And that's, uh, people who care about their product or their mission of the company. But it's my opinion, that's only one way of going about this. I do agree, agree that you should be passionate about what you're doing. I don't think you actually need to be passionate about the product. I think you can. That's one way to do this. I would say the second way is there's caring about the journey, is about finding love and meaning in in the grind. If you start a plumbing company or for an electrician, you may not care about plumbing or electrician or electricity in people's homes, but you could actually care about creating jobs for blue-collar folks or making customers happy or just building something.

I do that now. That pitch, you know what, if I go back to that time, I'll start shaking and sweating, get all nervous, and my heart will pound. I might not give the whole pitch. Let me tell you what I would focus on. I would say that we all know here that what we have created is unique, and it's solving a gigantic problem. No one on earth is going to do what we've done. And when you use this product, we all know how magical it is. It will find its home. Everybody on the planet loves music. There are millions of musicians that produce great music and they can't find each other. When this thing finally finds its home, it's going to change culture. And how many times in your life do you have a chance to do that?

Isn't that awesome? That's a good story. Now, it's clear what motivates Travis is competition. He likes to win. Not everyone may care about winning as much as he does. But that's what drives him. That's why he wanted to go. So when he faces a challenge, he goes, I just want to compete. And I just want to win. And he did it with Uber. He did it with table tennis or tennis on Wii. And later in that story, Chris actually says that he did the same thing with Angry Birds. He was ranked really high with that. But this is just how he's always been. In fact, prior to starting Uber, he had, when he was a kid, when he was 18, he had an SAT business where he would teach kids how to succeed on the SAT. And I found this speech that he gave years and years ago, And it's a long talk. It's like a 45-minute talk, but I remember listening to it and there's literally a 15-second clip where he mentions his SAT business and the way that his voice inflects and the way that his voice changes. It was like, wait a minute. The most exciting thing of this whole talk was him bragging about how he got so good at the SAT that he could finish a 30-minute segment in 8 minutes. And then later he actually talks about his, uh, how he would get a perfect score, but just listen to his voice when he explains his SAT. Now in this part of the story, he's talking about what he was doing prior to Uber. And he just brings up this SAT and even laughs at himself because he realizes how silly and nerdy he is. But I just found the fire in his voice to be incredibly inspiring. Check this out. Uh, okay.

So brief history. So I started as sort of like a hobbyist hacker. Coder dude. My first company was when I was 18. It was actually a company called New Way Academy. It was SAT prep, old school, no technology. I burned out on filling out bubbles, you know, with a pencil, A, B, C, D, etc. But man, I can kill the SAT. I've been timed 8 minutes on a half-hour math section. Okay. Okay. All right. Sorry.

How funny is that? I wish you got to see this video. This is from Techno Media. So if you go to YouTube, Travis Kalanick startup lessons from the Jam Pad, it's at 12:10, 12:20 in the video. It's amazing how he lights up about this. It's funny. It's fascinating. And when I heard that, I was like, oh my gosh, you remember at 18 that you could do 8 minutes in an 8-minute SAT section. Like, you're just, you're fascinated with winning, and that's cool. That's what motivates him. And not everyone's actually focused on winning. Some people, they like a different part of the grind. So Mark Cuban, Mark Cuban started a company that made him a billionaire. I believe he started it when he was about 38, but it was called Broadcast.com. He sold it for billions of dollars or made him a billionaire. And prior to that, he actually had a company called MicroSolutions. It was an IT integrations business, which basically means, I believe he started this in the '90s or actually late '80s when companies wanted new software. It was an ordeal and he would help them pick software and he would help them install it. So he didn't make the software necessarily, but he would master it and figure out how to install it. And with that business, he ran that business for 7 years. So from his mid-20s to his early 30s, and when he sold it, he made about $2 million, which is a lot of money, but he had a business for 7 years and he eventually became a billionaire. I mean, that took a long time. And when asked about that, he gave an amazing answer. So this is actually a really short clip from the podcast, How I Built This. So if you Google How I Built This, Mark Cuban, you'll be able to see it. And in this clip, he's talking about how he would kind of be a workaholic early on. And the host, Guy Raz, I believe his name is, asked him why he would do that. And Mark explains. Let's check this out.

I didn't look at it and say, okay, I'm going to try to work 24, 36 hours or whatever. I looked at it as saying, okay, this is fascinating. This is intellectually challenging. I want to solve this problem. And if I don't do it, I'm not going to get paid and I'm going to lose all this time. So solve the problem. And that's what I would do.

Here's the thing. There's about 150 people that run the world. Anybody who wants to go into politics, they're all fucking puppets, okay? There are 150, and they're all men, that run the world, period, full stop. They control most of the important assets, they control the money flows, and these are not the tech entrepreneurs. Now, they, they are going to get rolled over over the next 5 to 10 years by the people that are really underneath pulling the strings. And when you get behind the curtain and see how that world works, what you realize is it is unfairly set up for them and their progeny. Now, I'm not going to say that that's something that we can rip apart, but first order of business is I want to break through and be at that table. That's the first order of business. And the way that I do that is by proving that I can do what they do as well as they do it. And then do it better than how they do it, because at the end of the day, they are commercial fucking animals. Okay. And they'll open the door out of curiosity and they'll let me stay because I, because I add value. And then once I'm there, I can open the door for other people who can try to do the same thing. So my entire goal now is that, is to be in a position to aggregate enough of the capital of the world to then reallocate it against my worldview. And I'm not saying my worldview is the best. Or right, but it is mine. And at the end of the day, there are 150 other fucking guys with their worldview, and they don't give a shit what you think about their fucking worldview. That's the truth. And so why not me? Why not? Why not one of you? Why not? And so in my life now, I'm just kind of like, why not? Why the fuck not?

In that clip, you'll hear that he's But clearly also motivated by some type of chip on his shoulder and wanting to prove people wrong, which is a whole nother conversation. But you'll hear he very blatantly, unapologetically says, I want to get incredibly rich so I can do— I can use that money for the way that I want to use it. Later on, like I said, he says climate change, but that's what motivates him. That's what kept him going for— I mean, he's had a very long career. And he's still like, he doesn't have to work anymore. He's already a billionaire, but that's what motivates him and keeps him going through years and years of hard-ass work. And so I've just showed you examples of people going through hell and taking a long time. And this episode started with me talking about time, but then it also starts about going through like hardship, but it's all rooted in this idea of I'm trying to personally elevate my own perspective and I'm doing it By doing podcasts like this, I'm just teaching what I'm learning. And I'm reading a great book. There's this author named Robert Greene. He's got this great book called The Laws of Human Nature, and he's got this chapter called Elevate Your Perspective: The Law of Shortsightedness. And it really hit me, so I started reading more of his books. He's got another great book called Mastery, and I want to read something about this, about this book, which— and the idea of mastery is, in order to be great, In order to be great at anything, business, art, anything, it takes time and you need to become a master. And it's challenging. I mean, it's really hard to do this, but you have to actually care about what you're doing and you have to dedicate a ton of time to do it. So let me read some stuff that he talks about. So 2,600 years ago, an ancient Greek poet wrote, Become who you are by learning who you are. What he meant is the following: you are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are. They stop trusting in themselves, they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature. If you allow yourself to learn who you really are by paying attention to that voice and force within you, then you can become what you are fated to become: an individual and a master. He goes on to say, "You must engrave deeply in your mind and never forget, your emotional commitment to what you are doing will translate into your work. If you go at your work with a half heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end. If you are doing something primarily for money and without a real emotional commitment, it will translate to something that lacks a soul and has no connection to you." You may not see this, but you can be sure that the public will feel it, and they will receive your work in the same lackluster spirit in which it was created. If you're excited and obsessive in the hunt, it will show in the details. If your work comes from a place deep within, its authenticity will be communicated. So that's the episode on time. I hope you liked it. My Twitter handle is @TheSamParr. Also in the reviews, you can leave a comment on iTunes and let me know if you like this and I can do more of these. Please share this on your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feed so we get more views, and I appreciate you listening. Talk soon.