Patrick Collison

Alternative Titles

• How Disneyland, Apollo 8, and Git Were Built in Months
• The Lost Art of Shipping Civilization-Scale Projects in Days
• Why a 1942 Pentagon Took 491 Days, a 2022 Bus Lane Took 7,600
• From BankAmericard to mRNA-1273: A Catalog of Improbable Speed

Key Takeaways

• Dee Hock launched BankAmericard (later Visa) in 90 days from scratch, signing 100,000+ customers in that window — a reminder that consumer-scale financial infrastructure can be stood up at startup tempo when authority is concentrated.
• Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works delivered the P-80 Shooting Star, the USAF's first jet fighter, in 143 days; Donald Hall and Lindbergh designed and built the Spirit of St. Louis in 60 days, sizing the fuel load by measuring a globe with string at the San Diego library.
• Wartime mobilization compressed timelines dramatically: the Marinship yard went from telegram to first completed ship in 197 days; the 1,700-mile Alaska Highway across tundra was built in 234 days; the Pentagon, the world's largest office building, took 491 days under Brehon Somervell, whose answer to 'when do you need it' was 'the day before yesterday.'
• Iconic civilian landmarks were also fast: the Eiffel Tower in 793 days (tallest building in the world for 40+ years, ~$40M in 2019 dollars), the Empire State Building in 410 days, Disneyland in 366 days, and Treasure Island, a 400-acre artificial island in SF Bay, in roughly two years.
• The Berlin Airlift sustained 2.2 million Berliners with a landing every 2 minutes for 14 months across 277,000 flights; Tegel airport was planned, built, and opened within ~5 months, with first landings 92 days after construction began.
• Software and hardware show the same pattern: Brendan Eich prototyped JavaScript in 10 days; Ken Thompson wrote the first Unix in three weeks; Linus Torvalds had Git self-hosting 4 days in and shipping inside the Linux kernel 17 days after starting; the Xerox Alto, the first GUI computer, was built in roughly four months on a case-of-wine bet.
• Modern product timelines that felt fast: the iPod went from Fadell's hire to customer shipments in ~290 days; Amazon Prime was implemented and announced in six weeks; Apollo 8 was redirected to a lunar mission and launched 134 days later; the Boeing 747 program took 930 days from go-decision to first completed aircraft.
• COVID-19 vaccine development collapsed biotech timelines: Moderna finalized mRNA-1273's sequence 3 days after the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published, manufactured the first batch by Feb 7, shipped to NIH on day 45, and reported 94.5% efficacy 266 days later — showing regulatory/clinical work, not science, dominates the calendar.
• The contrast with today is stark and quantified: San Francisco's Van Ness bus lane took ~7,600 days and cost $110,000 per meter, versus $793/meter for the Alaska Highway in 2019 dollars; California High-Speed Rail's first phase is forecast for 2033, ~13,000 days after the authority formed, against France's TGV Paris–Lyon line opening 1,975 days after approval. Collison points to Dunkelman, Levy, Sagalyn, Glaeser, Howard, Olson, and Fukuyama's 'vetocracy' thesis as candidate explanations for a regime change in US capacity around the 1960s.

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