Draw the map and make it happen.

As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

That doesn’t refer to the city-state as we know it, but rather the empire as it was back in the day for my hometown of Augsburg, Germany. Located where the Wertach River joins the Letch River on its way to the Danube, which flows from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. The Danube is a long river starting in Germany and ending at the border between Romania and Ukraine.

Time-to-market advantages encourage getting designs to scale quickly.

Time to market is one of the most significant factors in the success of a product. The advantage of being first to enter space is that all who come after must be clearly better in some way. Whether it is a feature that resonates with buyers or a lower price, it will be an uphill battle for later entrants to gain market share. Recognition and higher gross margins go to the first mover. Even then, innovations can quickly become commodities.

This is never truer than during a period of upheaval. I was around for the digitization of the phone system. We went from Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone to using those same wires to carry data. As you know, that caught on well.