What Others Say About Timing
If you’ve been following me here, you know that I spent the last couple years workshopping, speaking, and writing about the impact timing has on the success of a product. In extension of that, the following is an overview of different approaches I’ve found of others dealing with the timing question.
The following is an overview of some of the different timing approaches I found. These and other thinkers, as well as a lot of direct contact with businesses trying out these ideas, helped me make what I believe is a useful book.
And as a result, this is the only book completely focused on how timing impacts a business’s success and what you can do about it. Whether for startups pitching for funding, product people evaluating what to build next, investors making funding decisions, and corporate teams deciding where to put resources… The book provides a way to step through these decisions, successful and failed timing examples, and patterns of outcomes to gain insight.
Each is worth exploring on its own. But I’ll leave that to you. Rather than go into these in the detail they deserve, I’ll leave you with brief introductions here. Read Why Now: How Good Timing Makes Great Products for more detail on many of these. (But really read the book for how you can approach your own timing situation and benefit.)
1. First-mover Advantage / First-mover Disadvantage (Marvin Lieberman and David Montgomery). First-mover advantage was a term casually thrown around starting with the Dotcom era, though the authors never wrote that it existed as claimed. Convince your investors that you had first-mover advantage (in practice just being able to claim that no one else had tried to do the thing… on the Internet).
The joke about first-mover advantage is that the authors of the 1988 paper that popularized the term found that their work had been twisted into all sorts of directions, many of which had nothing to do with their research. On their paper’s 10th anniversary they wrote a follow-up article on first-mover disadvantage and also edited some of their earlier claims.
Those updates gained little attention in 1998. We were moving to the height of the Dotcom / Telecom bubble era back then. First-mover advantage all the way!
2. Adjacent Possible (Stuart Kauffman). Kauffman takes an anthropological approach to this topic. As we invented more tools, those tools could be combined in more ways. Once you reach a certain point, the plethora of combinations leads to an explosion of creation.
Kauffman also provides a formula that describes the phenomenon.
3. Inflection points (Pete Flint). Why do we see rapid growth in certain technologies or industries? Inflection points can explain part of that.
This is something that humans tend to be poor at estimating. We historically experience the world linearly. Day to day changes are modest until… wham! We’re surprised by the sudden explosion of something new.
4. Creative destruction (Joseph Schumpeter). The concept describes the way that innovation destroys the legacy ways of business, along with it the legacy industries, companies, and jobs, and creates new ones.
5. Wheel of Fortune (original meaning, not the game show). The wheel of fortune is the concept that we (individuals or groups) go through ups and downs over time. The pauper turns into the king. The wealthy tribute state turns into the impoverished backwater.
6. Dominant design (James Utterback). How do early industrial decisions constrict later options? The emergence of a dominant design explains some of that. Utterback describes a process where new innovations go through different phases. There is the fluid phase, where new options compete with each other; the transitional phase, where a dominant design wins and businesses now compete to meet demand; and finally the specific phase where innovation is low and the focus is on quality and cost cutting.
Examples include the layout of the Qwerty keyboard (not designed for speed typing), the calculator keypad with its different layout from the phone keypad, and the enclosed steel automobile body.
7. Startup Market Opportunity Curve (Rizwan Virk). Virk explains industry-specific investment as part of a cycle. At the beginning there is lots of risk and little investment which is hard to raise, then lots of risk and lots of investment during which it becomes easier to raise.
The insight is in applying different tactics depending on the stage of your industry rather than consistent tactics throughout.
8. Flywheels (Jim Collins). How you can conceptualize an overall accumulation of effort that produces improving results. Get the flywheel spinning and it helps you spin it faster.
9. Portfolio company study (Bill Gross). This comes from a short TED talk and a couple other references. The founder of Idealab (an early incubator) analyzed 200 companies on the idea, the team, the business model, funding, and timing. Gross then estimated that 42% of company success was due to good or bad timing. He didn’t share his data or process, but it’s an interesting reference point. But contrasting his model and mine, I interpret four out of five of his categories as being related to timing.
To compare, I looked into companies I’ve worked with to see if timing held up as a success or failure factor. It did.
I looked at the largest portfolio of startups I’ve been involved with, from the incubator at the University of Southern California. Of the 168 companies from that portfolio that have been stable enough to survive for at least two and a half years (range two and a half to nine years), the failure rate was 51% for those with a timing advantage but 70% for those without a timing advantage. It was even more extreme in the acquisitions. Eight out of the nine acquired had timing advantages.
10. Installation periods / Deployment periods (Carlota Perez). Perez describes macro forces of government and category investment that lead to innovation, cost declines, and more.
11. The Multigenium (John Lienhard). Inventions come from individuals, but the “multigenium,” the many creations that enable other things to be invented, itself comes from the collective action of many.
12. The Inevitable (Kevin Kelly). Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly introduces a set of 12 inevitable changes we will see in the coming decades.
13. Moore’s Law in Reverse (Alan Kay). Alan Kay, of Xerox PARC describes the process they used to invest in futuristic computers for team members: “run Moore’s Law in reverse.” That is, rather than wait for the performance per cost curve to run its course, pay extra and get that computing power today. On those “machines of the future” you can build futuristic things. If you work with machines of today, you’re really working on technology of the past, which already passed through the Moore’s Law performance improvements.
14. Hype cycle. A visualization of the ups and downs of attention and expectations for new tech, as popularized by Gartner, with the following stages: On the rise, At the peak, Sliding into the trough, Climbing the slope, Entering the plateau.
A few years after the dotcom and telecom bubbles burst I attended a talk by the CTO of a large infrastructure company that saw its stock price skyrocket and then fall back to earth. He spent a lot of time talking about the hype cycle, referencing the railway industry of the 1800s. A nice history to know.
No one asked him why his own company rode it all the way up during the bubble and then all the way down. Not even me.
15. “Cambrian” explosions. There have been multiple eras of explosive creation throughout natural history. The Cambrian explosion was one of those, during which a large number of new species emerged. Why do these diversification periods happen in nature and why in the human-built world?
16. Tech/infrastructure leapfrogging. This largely depends on regulatory, economic, and geographic arbitrage. A common example: in some parts of the world, there never was a strong legacy fixed line telecom network. It was expensive and hard to get a landline.
So when wireless technology became good and cheap, deploying mobile networks and phones leapfrogged over the existing poor fixed line networks. In other countries that had strong fixed line networks, mobile phone penetration took longer. People already had easy telecom access.
17. Crossing The Chasm. Book by Geoffrey Moore that describes the way new products can reach the mainstream market. More about finding the path than timing, but it helps explain why a new product takes time to popularize, depending on the actions of its promoters.
There are more examples I could add, but this gives you an idea. People have been interested in the “why now” question for a long time. I hope that my Why Now book proves helpful as you think through timing and how you will act on it.