Timing
“Timing” – a cartoon that illustrates how getting market timing and positioning right can be one of the primary determinants of success.
Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab and a serial entrepreneur, surveyed 200 startups and found that 42% of the differences between successful and failed startups was timing, followed by the team (32%), idea (28%), business model (24%) and funding (14%).
This can be seen even in the hype around AI companies. According to Brendan Burke, a senior emerging technology analyst at PitchBook, data “suggests that investor momentum will be on early-stage startups in this new wave of AI rather than supporting late-stage vendors” and those using more classical (and older) models.
High valuations are being driven by recently formed startups such as Tome (which raised $43M Series A round at a $257M pre-money valuation) and Anthropic (which raised $300M Series C round at a money valuation of $4BN), and early stage A.I. startups addressing use cases like software, customer experience, and media generation.
Those with the best market timing and positioning are companies that had the foresight (or were lucky) to be in-market with product market fit to use the capital to win market share, rather than the new crowd who pile into a more competitive market.
