Everything is measured in terms of time. What is the time risk associated with something?
The one thing you cannot replace is time.340
For PayPal, we needed to establish a lot of back-office relationships to attach various data sources. The credit card system for processing credit cards, the Federal Reserve System for doing electronic funds transfers, the various fraud databases to run fraud checks. There was a lot we had to interface with, and it took a while to set all that up.
But by doing them all in parallel, it all came together simultaneously. Developing the software and having it ready for the general public coincided with us concluding deals with the outside vendors. All that took about a year.341
Avoid serialized dependencies. A lot of things have a “gestation period” and there is nothing you can do to accelerate it. If you can have all those things gestating in parallel, that will substantially accelerate your overall timeline. People tend to serialize too much. Put as many gestating elements in parallel as possible.342
If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.343