Built Fast, Built Slow

On September 17, 2026, a16z, the X account of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, posted the line over a screenshot of Patrick Collison’s “Fast” page. Collison, cofounder and CEO of the payments company Stripe, keeps the page as “Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together,” each with a source. From his list:

• The Empire State Building: started and finished in 410 days.
• Amazon Prime: six weeks from the start of work to its announcement in February 2005.
• USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine: 1,173 days from the US decision to build it to service.
• The iPod: about 290 days from Tony Fadell’s hiring to the first shipments.
• JavaScript: Brendan Eich built the first prototype in 10 days, in May 1995.
• Xerox’s Alto computer: started in November 1972 after a Xerox executive bet a case of wine it couldn’t be done in three months. The first complete Altos were introduced on March 1, 1973.
• Unix, the operating system: Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks.
• Git, a tool for tracking changes to code: tracking its own code four days after Linus Torvalds started it in April 2005.

The line was in use before a16z posted it. Andy Jassy, then CEO of Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud business, said in his keynote at AWS’s 2020 re:Invent conference, “Speed is not preordained. Speed is a choice.” In 2022, Adam Selipsky, then running AWS, told Fortune, “We really believe that speed matters. And speed is a choice.” In a March 2025 talk on Abundance, the book he wrote with Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein said that “slowly we have forgotten: speed is a choice.” In the same answer he put it the other way: “We have chosen slowness.”

On the slow side:

• New York’s Second Avenue Subway: first proposed by 1920, its first three stations opened on January 1, 2017.
• Blue Origin and SpaceX, two private rocket companies with the same goal: Blue Origin, founded in 2000, first reached orbit in January 2025. SpaceX, founded two years later, reached orbit in September 2008. Blue Origin’s mascot is a tortoise; Jeff Bezos explained it in 2016 as “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

Collison notes that the physical infrastructure projects on his list “occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree,” and links several explanations without settling on one. One is Francis Fukuyama’s: the American system of checks and balances has become a “vetocracy,” which in a 2013 essay he describes as giving “too many actors the means to stifle adjustments in public policy.” The one truly optimistic point of Abundance, Klein said, is that “we chose these problems. And if you chose a problem, you can un-choose it.”