Dee Hock was given 90 days to launch BankAmericard (which became Visa) from scratch. He did it — and signed up more than 100,000 customers in that window.

On what a single operator can do under an aggressive deadline.

Kelly Johnson and his Skunk Works team designed and delivered the P-80 Shooting Star, the USAF's first jet fighter, in 143 days.

Linus Torvalds started Git on April 3, 2005. It was self-hosting 4 days later, and 17 days after work commenced, Linux 2.6.12-rc3 was publicly released using it.

Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit it in March, a contract manufacturer was hired in April, and the first production iPod shipped in November — about 290 days end to end.

When asked when something was needed, Pentagon construction lead Brehon Somervell's go-to response was 'the day before yesterday.' The decision to proceed was made on a Thursday evening; initial drawings were done that Sunday. The world's largest office building was finished 491 days after construction started.

San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022 — roughly 7,600 days — at $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, built across remote tundra in 234 days, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.

The contrast Collison uses to dramatize modern infrastructure decay.

On Jan 10, 2020 the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. 3 days later Moderna finalized the mRNA-1273 sequence; 45 days later the first batch shipped to NIH for Phase 1 trials. The actual scientific work was fast — what followed was 266 days of clinical trials and regulatory coordination.

Work on the Xerox Alto, the first GUI computer, started because of a bet: Chuck Thacker said a futuristic computer could be done 'in three months' and a Xerox exec bet him a case of wine it couldn't. The first complete Altos appeared roughly on schedule.