Mark Suster wrote a great post about a year and a half ago that has been sitting in my box waiting to be added to the blog. His post, 9 Women Can’t Make A Baby In A Month, highlights the argument for time in building a business:

Markets develop for a complex set of factors that are often beyond all of our control. It is often the fortuitous mixture of new technologies, customer awareness and then acceptance of the technology and then the slow adoption into our daily lives that leads to markets exploding.

Nascent startup markets are like fine wine, they take time to develop.

But that’s not the only important point in his post, although he doesn’t directly assess this one: constraints are critical. The early stages of company development are all about constraints. Small team, small budget, limited time, tight product description, limited marketing reach, tiny sales staff. Feature creep is dangerous. Every decision must be carefully considered.

True innovation occurs through constraints, and having a small team is just one way to force constraints into the system.