Michael Saylor gave founders a timetable with numbers in it, which is rarer than it sounds. “If you're successful in less than four years, you got lucky,” he said. Between four and 10 years, by his account, is “very, very normal.” And past that: “If you haven't had success by the 10-year point, you're probably not cut out for the business.”
What makes it interesting is that it runs directly against the story the industry tells about itself. The founder mythology is built on speed: the company that goes from nothing to an acquisition inside three years and the twenty-something who never had to grind. Saylor's version puts that outcome in the luck column rather than the skill column and treats the long middle as the normal case rather than as failure.
