the bloomberg terminal took three years to build before one customer paid for it. michael bloomberg, now worth $109 billion, says that gap is the reason nobody ever caught up: "there was a need. nobody really thought that having that computer in the middle was useful. and by the time it was done, which was three years before we really had a customer, it was too late for anybody to catch up." "since then there are plenty of people who have good products, but they only do one or two of the 10 or 20 things that we do." "we just focused on building the best thing we could, and not necessarily always listening to what the customers want. I've always asked, and customers can be very valuable, but that doesn't mean they are able to think in terms of what we could do with a computer." three years of no revenue looks identical to failure while you are inside it. takes a lot of grit to continue.