In an earlier post, I suggested that entrepreneurs need to have a high tolerance for errors. Another trait they need is patience.
I've seen dozens of companies pull the plug on products--declaring them a failure--only to have the same idea surface a year later and be a roaring success. I worked with a company in the 90's that created an online site very similar in concept to FaceBook. After 6 months, they decided it wasn't growing fast enough and scraped it. Ditto a company in 2002 that had a concept similar to Twitter. They gave it about 9 months to succeed, then killed it.
Maybe these ideas were born too soon. Maybe they wouldn't have taken off for years. But when they did, they would have made their founders bail-out size fortunes. Moral of the story: launch, nurture continuously and wait.
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