People quickly accomplishing ambitious things together

Patrick Collison of Stripe has started putting together a list of ‘examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.’ Sometimes an idea comes screaming into the world.

Xerox Alto. Work on the Xerox Alto, the first GUI-oriented computer, started in November 1972 because of a bet: “Chuck said that a futuristic computer could be done ‘in three months’ and a Xerox exec bet him a case of wine that it couldn’t be done”.

Git. Linus Torvalds started working on Git on April 3 2005. It was self-hosting 4 days later. On April 20 2005, 17 days after work commenced, Linux 2.6.12-rc3 was publicly released with Git.

BankAmericard. Dee Hock was given 90 days to launch the BankAmericard card (which became the Visa card), starting from scratch. He did. In that period, he signed up more than 100,000 customers.

Amazon Prime. Amazon started to implement the first version of Amazon Prime in late 2004 and announced it on February 2 2005, six weeks later.