Cartoon: Timing
“Timing” by Iantoons
This new cartoon illustrates how market timing is often overlooked as one of the most important determinants of a start-up’s success.
Wilbur Labs, a venture incubator, recently did a post-mortem of over 368 start-ups and found that the two primary cited reasons by founders for failure were running out of cash and insufficient market demand for a product.
However, behind both of these reasons is the fact that launching a product when the market is ready is often more crucial than the product idea itself.
Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, mentioned in his study of start-ups that timing was “the number one thing” and accounted for “42% of the difference between success and failure”.
The human desire for controllable factors might be at work for why founder post-mortems rarely bring up the timing issue.
We can see this timing phenomenon occurring at the moment with those AI companies that were funded before the OpenAI launch in November 2022. Brendan Burke, senior emerging technology analyst at Pitchbook, recently told Fortune: “Most pre-GenAI companies have struggled to find their next chapter as the underlying technology races by them and investors look for new ideas.”
You can find more Iantoons cartoons here.
