Paul Buchheitāoriginal developer of Gmail and Google AdSense, founder of FriendFeedādiscusses how projects can obtain ‘overnight success’.
This notion of overnight success is very misleading, and rather harmful. If you’re starting something new, expect a long journey. That’s no excuse to move slow though. To the contrary, you must move very fast, otherwise you will never arrive, because it’s a long journey! This is also why it’s important to be frugal — you don’t want to starve to death half the way up the mountain.
He has also written another excellent post on a number of important development aspects he learnt while writing Gmail.
via Coding Horror (itself, an excellent post)