The Wall Street Journal has a good piece, based on Christian Chabot’s blog post, about how long it takes to build a technology empire.

Turns out it takes an average of eight years to hit $50m in revenue, which is about the point when you can start thinking about things like going public. And this is for the top 100 largest software companies, so we’re talking about the biggest winners here. One of the most valuable companies ever founded, in any industry, in any country, took 8 years to hit $50m in sales, Microsoft. Oracle took 10. Locally I often point to the timelines of successes like iRobot and Harmonix and the time it took them.

But hey, let’s say you’re still trying to hit the obviously unrealistic five year projections  of a typical venture capitalist (unrealistic only from a purely factual, statistical basis you understand), what’s the fastest way to the top?

Thankfully Tableau’s study breaks down the companies by market segment… so I did a little extra simple math. Here were the averages for how long it took to hit $50m in revenue by market segment:

Network (Rackspace, Echelon): 10.6 years
Security (Symantec, Sourcefire): 8.2 years
Database (Netezza, Oracle): 8 years
Content Management (Adobe, Digital River): 7.5 years
Entertainment (Activision, EA): 6 years

Feeling impatient? Don’t start a networking company, start a gaming company. Of course, this is a limited study and breaks with our deep-seeded need to be working on “serious stuff.” But it’s actually not just historical, it seems to be repeating itself right now. At least three Social Gaming companies founded post 2007 will be, or already have, hit $50m in revenue in their first three years of business.

The interesting dichotomy that the data suggests is this: it will take longer than you expect to hit success, and building fun might actually accelerate that path.