@kimsia Thanks for bringing this up! You’re right in saying that often entrepreneurs lose out on market timing, perhaps because your stab at it was too early, or you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I don’t think it’s right to say that action isn’t justified. If you’re too early you just pivot out, or you go and do something that later turns out not to be the biggest winner from that opportunity. Something something when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade — which seems to be the case with these expert entrepreneurs.
I remember naively thinking this was quite counter-intuitive and sad (surely you don’t want to ‘waste’ years of your life on a ‘suboptimal’ company?) … but I think Sarasvathy got it right in saying that you can’t do any better than taking your best shot, since startups are just fundamentally uncertain and impossible to predict. In a podcast interview Keith Rabois (of Square and PayPal fame) had this to say, which I found so unusual and odd at the time that it took me awhile to realise he was actually inhabiting the effectual worldview:
To me, there’s no such thing as a mistimed company. I think the founder’s job is to triangulate to what’s possible. So to me when a founder says “I was wrong about the timing” or “I missed the timing” it just means you didn’t do your job. You need to plan for what’s possible today, and figure out hacks. So for example, Square started out with a card reader, a hardware device that you plugged into your phone, just your phone, whether Android or iOS, and Jack (Dorsey) always thought this was a temporary hack. That ultimately, Square would not require hardware, and certainly wouldn’t depend on hardware on your phone. Which has proven to be the case. It’s now eight years later, and Square Cash is the engine of the company, which has nothing to do with hardware. Square mobile payments — a huge fraction, I haven’t looked at the latest earning calls numbers — but the majority of transactions must be running off an iPad, not a phone. But Jack was obviously an extraordinary and stellar entrepreneur, and he knew his job was to shepherd the product into the market with what was possible to do at the time, and not wait for massive inflections in consumer behaviour. That’s what a good entrepreneur does … is, triangulates how do I get to where I need to get to, where I want to get to, with what is possible to do today, with hacks and bridges, not sitting back and whining.
Source clip: https://twitter.com/ejames_c/status/1663407893536997377?s=20
@uma I’m like 99% sure it’s Khosla!