Sublime

Eric Yuan, founder of the video communications company Zoom, started the company at age forty-one; by then, he was a senior vice president at Cisco, leading a thousand-person team.

Ozzie: The thing that's not really characteristic, that doesn't really translate from both of my startups to what other entrepreneurs do, is that I think of the challenges I take on as 10-year challenges, not filling a quick market niche. There tends to be some time where I'm building up a level of technological advantage for when we get to market.

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Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, echoes Hauptly’s formula for innovation when he describes his own approach to building three massively successful companies: “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time . . . Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”