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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.
But what is the HubSpot Podcast Network? That's right, it's a new thing by HubSpot. They started with our podcast, and now they're branching into more and more podcasts with experts in different business areas. So you might have a podcast about marketing, or sales, or operations, or customer service.
And we're gonna go over, through the different podcasts on this network, some are more entertaining, some are more informational, some are a good mix of both. That's what we try to do here.
And HubSpot's goal here is to have on-demand mentors. So if you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, or you're scaling up, you're gonna be able to hear practical tips and inspirational stories by listening to the different podcasts on their network. Which by the way, I think this is a smart idea. Too many brands just try to sell you their thing. HubSpot, I love their approach here. They're like, let's put out great, valuable, free content and help more companies succeed. And the more companies that we help succeed, the more we'll eventually come back to us, sort of like a good karma kind of thing. So listen, learn and grow with HubSpot Podcast Network, hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.

**Sam Parr** (1:02)
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 six months? What would happen if you dedicated 50 years to something instead of three to five years or however long a lot of people look at 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 long time, going through that period where you're just getting something going and it stinks for two, three, four, five, six 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 handles the Sam Parr and I'll do some more, but let's get into this first one. And actually before we do this podcast, 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 accomplish most goals. I think it takes longer 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 six 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, because we've 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, 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 we're talking five or 10 year spans 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 Westergren, the founder of Pandora, the music streaming service. They were one of the first apps on the iPhone. They recently sold a couple of years ago for like three 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.