My advice? Take your time. Delivery.com Founder Story

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Whether we’re talking about the aqueducts or the internet, it’s the same old story. Every successful entrepreneur needs to have a vision of what their company should become, but getting there is rarely quick, never easy, and always unpredictable. The biggest challenges along the way are simply accepting these facts from the get-go. 

“Patience is a virtue” is hard to hear when you’re itching to disrupt and create something new. But patience is just knowing the difference between the things you can change and the things you can’t… yet. And until the serene mind behind that little soundbite finds a way to slow down time, the best you can do is roll with the punches.

No one starts Day 1 with a full team around them; you have to build one that evolves along with the product and the market, but you can’t make it all happen at once. The tech world is full of people who are inherently impatient—it’s what leads to success as much as it facilitates failure. Steve Jobs had a perfectly crystallized vision of the world as it should be, but his only option was to patiently drag everyone else into that reality. It must have been incredibly frustrating. 

Everyone talks about “first-mover advantage” and rightfully so, but first movers carry with them plenty of risk. Whether a large incumbent is sitting on older technology or stubbornly set in their ways, challengers can have considerable advantages of their own. Facebook was not the first social network, Google was not the first search engine, and both will always have someone nipping at their heels. You just have to see what people have taken to and adapt ahead of it.

At delivery.com, timing issues pose their own unique dilemmas. We’re part of a two-sided marketplace here: one side with customers, the other with our merchants. The former group is often quick to adopt new ideas; the latter consists of brick-and-mortar business owners seldom on the cutting edge of tech. It’s our job to keep up with consumer demands while keeping our merchant base along for the ride—a high-wire tightrope act, to be sure, and one that requires plenty of patience and careful planning.

There’s no playbook for entrepreneurship in the 21st century, or if there is, it’s still being written. If you want to end up a chapter rather than a footnote, take a breath and take your time before you take the world by storm.