Change is slow, and that’s good thing

An oft-heard refrain these days is a lament “Everything’s changing so fast!” and it would be easy to sign up to this notion.

Look how we totally rely on our smartphones these days, turning to them an average of 150 times a day. It makes one wonder what we did for entertainment, news and chat pre-2007. And yet, we’ve only had them for 10 years. It’s gone in a blink of an eye.

See how Uber and Airbnb have blasted into our market, totally disrupting and changing the way we move around the city, or stay in other cities (or have total strangers to stay with us). Uber only got going in Perth in 2014, and has over 20% of the market. Airbnb launched into Australia a couple of years earlier and has upwards of 30% across Australia these days.

And yet, even these stories prove that the best changes – the ones that stick – take time.

There had been smartphones well before 2017, and phones with access to the internet had been around for a while. The best marketing the iPhone did was to announce itself as the game changer, yet even the iPhone took a while to take off. Early versions’ battery life was poor, and not everyone liked using a finger to tap on a virtual keyboard through glass. The Blackberry ruled supreme, and had a built in keyboard. This was much closer to peoples’ existing experience, which was why it was named “the crackberry”. Its devotees were obsessed by it.

The iPhone 3 was the version that took off, launched as it was with the app store in 2009. It was this moment that saw the inexorable shift to the smartphone (which  really should have been termed the ‘app phone’, as phones had been smart before – it was the apps that made them different now). The creation of the cottage industry of app makers was the true revolution, and this underpinned the smart (sorry, app) phone’s rise. Soon Samsung and Google jumped on board.

Looking deeper into the Uber and Airbnb cases you can see that they did not exactly take off as over night successes either. Launched in 2007, it took til 2011 before Airbnb would launch in multiple cities and gain traction, on the back of some serious capital raises in 2010. Likewise, Uber, founded in 2009, took a couple of years and then a major seed round in 2011 before it could launch in various jurisdictions with UberX in 2012. Indeed, Uber was not the first ride-sharing service, and they held back looking at the rulings coming out regarding the legality or otherwise of this new form of transportation. (Others could argue that ride sharing had actually been created in the early 1900s, or even the 16th century, but that’s another story.)

The history of even these wildly successful game-changing disruptors started with relatively quiet 2 or 3 years where things were far from certain. They were learning, pivoting and inching their way to the best formula. When I meet tech founders who think they’ll take off immediately with hockey stick growth I tell them the real stories of hardship, years and years of struggle, before even the best break out. Are you up for that? Founding a startup may seem glamorous when you see the gazillionares adorn magazine covers, blaze around at Burning Man or stomp across tech conference floors delivering well honed keynotes in their black t-shirts, dark blue jeans and high end trainers. But they all had hard starts, and there were many failures, mistakes, missteps and sleepless nights. It’s not all glamour, believe me.

So I would argue that change is slow. Indeed, the best ideas always grow slowly, and that’s a good thing, because things that grow slowly tend to last a long time.

Just talk to a turtle (average age 100 years) or Methuselah, a Californian bristlecone pine tree that was seeded in 2,833 BC. She ain’t pretty, but she’s still here.

Slow is good. Slow and steady wins the race. It’s hard work. It’s not very glamorous. It’s a million small things you do, day after day after day, that get you there. There is no silver bullet. And that’s a good thing.