Timing of Ideas

Published on Twitter, August 21, 2014

A thing I believe that few believe: Almost all Silicon Valley startup ideas from qualified founders = great ideas. But some are too early.

Track startups over multiple decades, what you find is that most ideas do end up working. It's much more a question of "when" not "if".

This is interesting for several reasons:

• First, it means that criticism of the form "that will never happen" is usually misguided & wrong.

• Second, it means that a much bigger risk for founders is "too early", vs "wrong" or "too late". Often doesn't match feedback from others. To quote Peter Thiel:

  It is often better to be the last company to market (hit timing right & take down the entire market) vs the first.

• Third, when you have the timing right, you almost always feel like you're too late. Terrified you've missed the window = great sign. When idea X has been in the air, with repeated attempts to build X, yet most customers are not yet doing/using X, it's never too late.

• Fourth, founders by definition live in the future, see a world that doesn't yet exist & try to make it so. Nailing timing = hardest thing. Which is often why more pragmatic founders end up building the big & important companies -- the idealists were just too early.

• Fifth, therefore, most of the great ideas for the next two decades are already known. In labs, in failed startups, in big companies prototypes. Those ideas are being dismissed now since the early attempts have't worked. This has the opposite predictive value vs what people think.

Quoting William Gibson:

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed

Or it's not yet distributed at all. But it is here.

The key question is: What ideas are widely dismissed today due to having been tried & failed? Answer is the codex to the next 20 years.