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> In contrast, some really talented and hardworking founders just happen to work on the wrong things and don’t attain the same level of success. Some even tried

> In contrast, some really talented and hardworking founders just happen to work on the wrong things and don’t attain the same level of success. Some even tried Zuck’s idea but were too early. It often isn’t their fault. The timing just wasn’t right. How do you plan your company around timing? It seems easy to say "they had good timing" in retrospect. This sounds like hindsight bias. It's too easy to blame timing instead of your own mistakes. For example, with Justin TV/ Twitch TV they were "too early" because 4G internet was not ubiquitous, and most average people could not even consume their streams. After years of grinding it out, the tech caught up and they were positioned to lead the market. It's certainly possible to be "too early" or "too late" to market. I think if you have the right people working together you can make it through being "too early". If you're "too late" then you have the opportunity to win with brand appeal or marketing now that the market is familiar with the product or service.

Waterluvian 9y ago
Timing is just a component of luck, no?
- adventured 9y ago
  I'd agree that it frequently can be. It's not always luck however. There's another component to it. Actually spotting that the time has arrived for a thing, that a confluence of technologies is ready to make something new possible at a formerly impossible scale (or possible period). That doesn't have to be luck. Paul Allen watched like a hawk what was going on in the very early personal computing market, he was aggressive and relentless in doing so, as well as about prodding Gates about starting a business around it (Gates then played brake to Allen being frequently early with an idea). That Microsoft was one of the first software companies, wasn't luck, they saw the opportunity after watching it for years and then acted. It took a lot of intentional time and effort application for Allen to accumulate the knowledge and skill necessary to see that opportunity coming. That's the case with Tesla. The iPhone. And so on. Jobs didn't like the Newton because he believed it was a crap user experience. He was right, the time was wrong for the technology. He did the iPhone because he believed the time was right, that several technologies were ready to come together in a small form factor that could produce a high quality experience. That wasn't luck, it was decades of evolved knowledge and skill looking at a problem / opportunity.
- CM30 9y ago
  It can be, but there can be a skill component there as well. For example, you can look at current trends and made educated predictions that a new service might be popular at a certain point in the future. Or you can keep up with the news and create products or content that ride on the coattails of current trends. That requires a certain amount of skill in spotting opportunities just before they arise. On the other hand, luck definitely plays a part none the less. As informed as your preidictions may be, the future is never exactly certain, and a situation which can rationally appear to be a sure in can turn out to go the complete opposite way. Maybe the service you want to replace actually isn't getting shut down when people think it is, and people decide your service isn't useful at that point in time. Or (like with a lot of Reddit alternatives) the mass exodus doesn't happen for whatever reason (maybe because the controversy affected far less people than you imagined it would) and hence the massive boom in users doesn't occur. It can also be the case that an opportunity is indeed there, but you're not going to be the one to take advantage of it. After all, I'm sure numerous social networks were around in the early days of Facebook, yet it's Facebook that became the household name and made billions of dollars. Perhaps your biggest competitor got a few million dollars in venture capital funding and managed to market themselves far better than you could. Luck and timing are closely connected, but they're not necessarily so.
- maneesh 9y ago
  IMHO I think that there are some personality types of CEOs (visionary CEOs) who can see which way the future is heading and direct it. But most other people don't listen to or believe them
avaer 9y ago
You plan your company around timing by understanding the market and where it's going. Timing is a useful abstraction, as long as you don't use it as an excuse. Blaming timing for being wrong is blaming your customers for not wanting the thing you've made. Which is why it's not an excuse you hear from most serious entrepreneurs.
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  Or, you believe in your product enough to keep pushing forward, while also building out your company to survive the rough times until that happens. That means not blowing through VC money on frivolities, expecting a worst case scenario of struggling for years and years before the world catches on, building tech that can be reused intelligently and hiring people who understand that this is a crawl despite calling your development cycle a sprint.
  - bsder 9y ago
    > That means not blowing through VC money on frivolities You don't get a vote. The VC wants you to "Go Big or Go Home" NOW, not 5 years from now. The VC would rather you flame out and get off his portfolio than continue to be merely profitable. This is one of the things that causes founders to hate most VC's.
Mahn 9y ago
More often than not the right timing was the right timing only in hindsight, but I think there is merit to the argument of there being right timing sometimes. It is true that Instagram couldn't have happened before cheap smartphones with relatively high quality cameras, for example. It's not the only factor, but it can have a role depending on what you do.
lpolovets 9y ago
Examples of good timing that I have seen in startups: - Rise of a new use case (e.g. Checkr doing background checks for fast-growing on-demand companies like Uber and Instacart). - Legal/regulatory change (e.g. a key patent is about to expire, or a new govt regulation is about to impose more requirements on an industry). - Technology is finally adequate for doing something useful (e.g. VHS cassettes were replaced by DVDs, which were much cheaper for a company like Netflix to mail. Or maybe some sensor is finally miniaturized enough to be embedded into a constrained space for a good use case). There's still a lot of luck, but many smart founders think hard about the "why now?" question. If the answer is "this couldn't be done until the last year or two because X, Y, and Z" then that's promising; if the answer is "no one has thought of this before" or "many people have tried this but failed," then that's often a sign of danger.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  So much effort is wasted because the "why now" question is not asked with enough serious intent. I can kind of excuse 21 year old founders for ignoring this, but no serious investor should put a dime in until they have a great answer to this question.
- robterrin 9y ago
  Thank you for this comment Leo. My cybersecurity company (http://tailriskconsulting.com/ http://tailriskconsulting.com/) was spun up to help small and medium sized financial institutions doing business in New York State deal with new regulations (http://www.dfs.ny.gov/legal/regulations/adoptions/dfsrf500txt.pdf http://www.dfs.ny.gov/legal/regulations/adoptions/dfsrf500tx...). If you anybody is interested, we've written a guide to help understand the law: http://tailriskconsulting.com/TailRisk_NYSDFS_RR500_Guide.pdf http://tailriskconsulting.com/TailRisk_NYSDFS_RR500_Guide.pd...
cududa 9y ago
I had a startup idea January 2014. Looked at the market and available tech and decided to wait. Kept it in the back of my mind and would work on it many a weekend/ evening. Finally pulled the trigger a few weeks ago. It's going very well and I'm fairly certain the timing component is perfectly calibrated
- jansho 9y ago
  Well go on then, what's the startup idea? :)
VladimirGolovin 9y ago
> How do you plan your company around timing? Here’s my current example: 1. For the past 2-3 years I’ve been developing a todo app (Matterlist, formerly Tuskarr: http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/ http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/, past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14154378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14154378) to replace Wunderlist because I’ve always been unsatisfied with it. 2. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they will retire Wunderlist, likely in 2017. 3. I’m convinced that Wunderlist closure will be the biggest marketing opportunity Matterlist will ever have. The moment Microsoft announces the closure, there will be a lot of people in the world who are looking for a Wunderlist alternative, and there will be press people who will be interested in providing their audience with solutions. 4. Hence my decision to focus the website, SEO, ASO, and all marketing efforts in general on a single idea: “wunderlist replacement” / “wunderlist alternative”. 5. The focus will last for a year or so. This should be enough to establish Matterlist as a Wunderlist replacement in terms of SEO and in the minds of the audience. After that, I can begin gradually focusing away from the idea of “wunderlist alternative”. So basically, I’m betting the entire farm on a single timed event outside my control.
- ToJans 9y ago
  I wouldn't bet the house on a single horse; f.e. what it Microsoft suggests another todo app? One plan isn't enough IMO; you should have at least 5, or even 10? The odds of one plan failing are a lot bigger than the odds of all of them failing. It's all a numbers game IMO. I prefer to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. One of our more successful blog posts literally took me 2 minutes, while we have others that took over a day and didn't work at all...
  - VladimirGolovin 9y ago
    I'm afraid spreading out my semantic eggs across multiple baskets won't work for SEO. SEO is a long game, and it involves slowly building up focused external mentions, so I can't really flip-flop on that. On the other hand, I can freely experiment with paid ads and landing pages (they will be excluded from search), and that's where I can throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
- 9y ago
morgante 9y ago
> How do you plan your company around timing? It seems easy to say "they had good timing" in retrospect. You should have a thesis about what's changed in the world/market to make your product compelling now.
jansho 9y ago
> For example, with Justin TV/ Twitch TV they were "too early" because 4G internet was not ubiquitous, and most average people could not even consume their streams. I don't think people were ready for this either. In the early 2000s, it was still weird to hang out in forums, for example. It took an evolutionary-styled journey to normalise live video feeds. Instagram rolled out this feature only recently, once their users are used to the idea of sharing and crave for more ways to do so. But I also wonder if these "too early" failures are actually necessary to prepare the consumer's mind to the idea, so that next time, they're much more open to it. And, it helps that the next iteration is most certainly improved and more considerate of the human psyche.. "Justin TV" sounds like a narcissist experiment. "Instagram Stories"? You're not a 'voyeur' if this is a standard feature and everyone's using it ;)

Waterluvian 9y ago

Timing is just a component of luck, no?

adventured 9y ago
I'd agree that it frequently can be. It's not always luck however. There's another component to it. Actually spotting that the time has arrived for a thing, that a confluence of technologies is ready to make something new possible at a formerly impossible scale (or possible period). That doesn't have to be luck. Paul Allen watched like a hawk what was going on in the very early personal computing market, he was aggressive and relentless in doing so, as well as about prodding Gates about starting a business around it (Gates then played brake to Allen being frequently early with an idea). That Microsoft was one of the first software companies, wasn't luck, they saw the opportunity after watching it for years and then acted. It took a lot of intentional time and effort application for Allen to accumulate the knowledge and skill necessary to see that opportunity coming. That's the case with Tesla. The iPhone. And so on. Jobs didn't like the Newton because he believed it was a crap user experience. He was right, the time was wrong for the technology. He did the iPhone because he believed the time was right, that several technologies were ready to come together in a small form factor that could produce a high quality experience. That wasn't luck, it was decades of evolved knowledge and skill looking at a problem / opportunity.
CM30 9y ago
It can be, but there can be a skill component there as well. For example, you can look at current trends and made educated predictions that a new service might be popular at a certain point in the future. Or you can keep up with the news and create products or content that ride on the coattails of current trends. That requires a certain amount of skill in spotting opportunities just before they arise. On the other hand, luck definitely plays a part none the less. As informed as your preidictions may be, the future is never exactly certain, and a situation which can rationally appear to be a sure in can turn out to go the complete opposite way. Maybe the service you want to replace actually isn't getting shut down when people think it is, and people decide your service isn't useful at that point in time. Or (like with a lot of Reddit alternatives) the mass exodus doesn't happen for whatever reason (maybe because the controversy affected far less people than you imagined it would) and hence the massive boom in users doesn't occur. It can also be the case that an opportunity is indeed there, but you're not going to be the one to take advantage of it. After all, I'm sure numerous social networks were around in the early days of Facebook, yet it's Facebook that became the household name and made billions of dollars. Perhaps your biggest competitor got a few million dollars in venture capital funding and managed to market themselves far better than you could. Luck and timing are closely connected, but they're not necessarily so.
maneesh 9y ago
IMHO I think that there are some personality types of CEOs (visionary CEOs) who can see which way the future is heading and direct it. But most other people don't listen to or believe them

avaer 9y ago

You plan your company around timing by understanding the market and where it's going. Timing is a useful abstraction, as long as you don't use it as an excuse. Blaming timing for being wrong is blaming your customers for not wanting the thing you've made. Which is why it's not an excuse you hear from most serious entrepreneurs.

michaelchisari 9y ago
Or, you believe in your product enough to keep pushing forward, while also building out your company to survive the rough times until that happens. That means not blowing through VC money on frivolities, expecting a worst case scenario of struggling for years and years before the world catches on, building tech that can be reused intelligently and hiring people who understand that this is a crawl despite calling your development cycle a sprint.
- bsder 9y ago
  > That means not blowing through VC money on frivolities You don't get a vote. The VC wants you to "Go Big or Go Home" NOW, not 5 years from now. The VC would rather you flame out and get off his portfolio than continue to be merely profitable. This is one of the things that causes founders to hate most VC's.

Mahn 9y ago

More often than not the right timing was the right timing only in hindsight, but I think there is merit to the argument of there being right timing sometimes. It is true that Instagram couldn't have happened before cheap smartphones with relatively high quality cameras, for example. It's not the only factor, but it can have a role depending on what you do.

lpolovets 9y ago

Examples of good timing that I have seen in startups: - Rise of a new use case (e.g. Checkr doing background checks for fast-growing on-demand companies like Uber and Instacart). - Legal/regulatory change (e.g. a key patent is about to expire, or a new govt regulation is about to impose more requirements on an industry). - Technology is finally adequate for doing something useful (e.g. VHS cassettes were replaced by DVDs, which were much cheaper for a company like Netflix to mail. Or maybe some sensor is finally miniaturized enough to be embedded into a constrained space for a good use case). There's still a lot of luck, but many smart founders think hard about the "why now?" question. If the answer is "this couldn't be done until the last year or two because X, Y, and Z" then that's promising; if the answer is "no one has thought of this before" or "many people have tried this but failed," then that's often a sign of danger.

danieltillett 9y ago
So much effort is wasted because the "why now" question is not asked with enough serious intent. I can kind of excuse 21 year old founders for ignoring this, but no serious investor should put a dime in until they have a great answer to this question.
robterrin 9y ago
Thank you for this comment Leo. My cybersecurity company (http://tailriskconsulting.com/ http://tailriskconsulting.com/) was spun up to help small and medium sized financial institutions doing business in New York State deal with new regulations (http://www.dfs.ny.gov/legal/regulations/adoptions/dfsrf500txt.pdf http://www.dfs.ny.gov/legal/regulations/adoptions/dfsrf500tx...). If you anybody is interested, we've written a guide to help understand the law: http://tailriskconsulting.com/TailRisk_NYSDFS_RR500_Guide.pdf http://tailriskconsulting.com/TailRisk_NYSDFS_RR500_Guide.pd...

cududa 9y ago

I had a startup idea January 2014. Looked at the market and available tech and decided to wait. Kept it in the back of my mind and would work on it many a weekend/ evening. Finally pulled the trigger a few weeks ago. It's going very well and I'm fairly certain the timing component is perfectly calibrated

jansho 9y ago
Well go on then, what's the startup idea? :)

VladimirGolovin 9y ago

> How do you plan your company around timing? Here’s my current example: 1. For the past 2-3 years I’ve been developing a todo app (Matterlist, formerly Tuskarr: http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/ http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/, past HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14154378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14154378) to replace Wunderlist because I’ve always been unsatisfied with it. 2. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they will retire Wunderlist, likely in 2017. 3. I’m convinced that Wunderlist closure will be the biggest marketing opportunity Matterlist will ever have. The moment Microsoft announces the closure, there will be a lot of people in the world who are looking for a Wunderlist alternative, and there will be press people who will be interested in providing their audience with solutions. 4. Hence my decision to focus the website, SEO, ASO, and all marketing efforts in general on a single idea: “wunderlist replacement” / “wunderlist alternative”. 5. The focus will last for a year or so. This should be enough to establish Matterlist as a Wunderlist replacement in terms of SEO and in the minds of the audience. After that, I can begin gradually focusing away from the idea of “wunderlist alternative”. So basically, I’m betting the entire farm on a single timed event outside my control.

ToJans 9y ago
I wouldn't bet the house on a single horse; f.e. what it Microsoft suggests another todo app? One plan isn't enough IMO; you should have at least 5, or even 10? The odds of one plan failing are a lot bigger than the odds of all of them failing. It's all a numbers game IMO. I prefer to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. One of our more successful blog posts literally took me 2 minutes, while we have others that took over a day and didn't work at all...
- VladimirGolovin 9y ago
  I'm afraid spreading out my semantic eggs across multiple baskets won't work for SEO. SEO is a long game, and it involves slowly building up focused external mentions, so I can't really flip-flop on that. On the other hand, I can freely experiment with paid ads and landing pages (they will be excluded from search), and that's where I can throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
9y ago

morgante 9y ago

> How do you plan your company around timing? It seems easy to say "they had good timing" in retrospect. You should have a thesis about what's changed in the world/market to make your product compelling now.

jansho 9y ago

> For example, with Justin TV/ Twitch TV they were "too early" because 4G internet was not ubiquitous, and most average people could not even consume their streams. I don't think people were ready for this either. In the early 2000s, it was still weird to hang out in forums, for example. It took an evolutionary-styled journey to normalise live video feeds. Instagram rolled out this feature only recently, once their users are used to the idea of sharing and crave for more ways to do so. But I also wonder if these "too early" failures are actually necessary to prepare the consumer's mind to the idea, so that next time, they're much more open to it. And, it helps that the next iteration is most certainly improved and more considerate of the human psyche.. "Justin TV" sounds like a narcissist experiment. "Instagram Stories"? You're not a 'voyeur' if this is a standard feature and everyone's using it ;)