Yup, or put a bit differently: Timing is (almost) everything. There's usually only a short window in time where successful new tech companies can be started (maybe 1-3 years). Too early and nobody cares / buys your product, too late and you won't be able to raise enough capital to ever catch up.
I've sold three businesses to Idealab and the single biggest lesson I learned from Bill Gross was timing and having the means to buy yourself into the market in a short amount of time.<p><a href="https://ted2srt.org/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed" rel="nofollow">https://ted2srt.org/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reas...</a>
I like how they started laying out definitions and "theory", and then just repeated the title for 5-6 paragraphs.<p>I'm sure this wisdom is coming from ages of experience, and everyone respects this guy, but an outsider would have zero reason to adopt this other than "huh, that's sensible".<p>I think it's intuitively obvious and needs reinforcing, but obviously market isn't the "only" thing that matters. You do need <i>a reasonably competent team</i> and <i>a reasonably workable product</i> and all that requires a huge non-zero effort and a lot of wins.
One aspect of markets for relatively new technologies is that there is a dynamic related to the practicality and affordability of products and social momentum for new product categories. I suspect that things like patents sometimes play a role there also.<p>For example, e-ink displays. Personally I think the idea of having a photo or framed image on a wall that can display an effectively infinite number of different pictures, another one every day, is an extremely attractive proposition compared to the low-tech standard of leaving the same image there for years.<p>But it looks to me that the pricing for the display modules is holding that market back. Maybe because of a patent or something and not enough competition. But also, it COULD become a big thing at any time for a wealthy demographic, especially for the smaller ones say the size of a normal sheet of paper. But that depends on whether it becomes trendy. Which is partially about luck and what individual people do and how many friends they have.
Did anyone learn from that post or the comments on this page? I'm struggling to extract any value, everything is sensible, but a lot of it is opinions, open to interpretation and high level "its a judgement calls". I don't think any of it is useful in practice. Not much was backed by evidence or science.<p>My perspective: Always <i>just do it</i>. If you're good enough to succeed you'll succeed, and if you're not good enough, you never were gonna succeed anyway. Of course, you need to be scientific in your approach, but nothing on this page is scientific. Apart from my perspective ;)
On a side note, marketing is also hugely important for success. If you don’t know how to reach your market, it doesn’t matter how big your market or good your product is. No one will know about it.
This is so true. One of the startups I was involved in had the best team imaginable, and their product was vastly superior to the existing alternatives, but the market was already saturated so they had to grind out their sales for over a decade.<p>The next startup had a few really horrible people on the team, and they succeeded <i>in spite of</i> that fact. Eventually though larger macroeconomic conditions soured for them (ie the market evaporated) and the company failed.
I think the main factor is luck. It's like a sword in an online game. You can add critical chance to it by maximizing stats but it's always capped. If you have good team stats, good product stats and good markets stats, you just improve your chances. By how much? Impossible to compute in real life, in a game that would be +15%, so every few hits (products in our case) you will blow a critical. So let's just call it luck in the end.
At least one past thread - maybe others?<p><i>The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters (2007)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412463" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412463</a> - May 2017 (17 comments)
Two contrarian thoughts:<p>- He uses team (i.e., a balanced and cohesive unit), when he really means "team" (i.e., a collection individuals on the same payroll). Put another way, talent is not synonymous with team.<p>- This differentiation is important because Team is far more likely to find p/m fit than "team". Put another way, unless the market is new / created then it's there...sitting...waiting. Then the question is: Who finds it first? Answer: The most able team.
I think the main factor is being already rich or being born into a rich/influential family. A lot of problems startups have suddenly disappear when you can ask your dad for a small loan of 1 million dollars or ask your mum for a meeting with the chairman of IBM. Not saying this is the only factor but this "Great Filter" that weeds out those who don't have money or contacts helps others to develop their business with less competition.
Yes, as others have pointed out, market timing matters, but these days any market that is obviously a good one will get flooded with a ton of competitors, and with many of these markets consolidating to "winner takes all" status, most of those competitors will fail (or, perhaps more optimistically, get acquired).<p>I think the winner-take-all nature of many of these hot markets is something more apparent now than it was in 2007.
> One highly successful software entrepreneur is burning through something like $80 million in venture funding in his latest startup and has practically nothing to show for it except for some great press clippings and a couple of beta customers — because there is virtually no market for what he is building.<p>Who was he talking about? Anyone has any clues?
The startup scene has changed significantly the last 10 years.
Thalmic labs/north failed as a startup but they still managed to get acquired and celebrated as a success story.
"When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins."<p>I think this is wrong, should be: "When a lousy team meets a great market, a competitor wins."