Getting Your Timing Right

Yesterday a friend came to visit me...someone I have known practically all my life. Every so often we do a check-in. He commented that I (and also Haviva) are usually a few years or more ahead of the curve... Now he was saying this both as an observation and to some degree a compliment. But reminded me how important it is in start-up life to get timing right. Being the "first" to do something is not always the best practice. When I started in the world of VoIP, most consumers barely had a PC, internet connectivity was a new thing and far from what we enoy today, and most important, most people did not have speakers or a microphone attached to their PC...so obviously voice over internet in 1996 was a bit challenging in the consumer market. Things change fast -- by 2003, when Skype launched, there was a critical mass of people with broadband internet, speakers and microphones were standard. The timing was right. In 2006 I funded a cross-platform app store for mobile apps. The iphone and AppStore did not yet exist. Mobile devices were a huge pain in the neck, with hundreds of variations of operating systems. We did not succeed. A very short while later the iphone launched, and was successful to some degree because of the AppStore. In politics works the same. If you "launch" your political movement before the stars are aligned you will not succeed...I remember the many years that Women of the Wall struggled to get attention...now a front page story and the Prime Minister leading the way to a radical reshuffling of how the Jewish world will relate to the Western Wall. When I became a vegan over ten years ago soy milk was not even thought about, today at every Aroma or Starbucks it is the choice of many. And I was so pleased to see at an Aroma in Haifa yesterday that they now have vegan pastries! Vegan has become cool! Of course, being way ahead of the trend for healthy eating has obvious benefits to me on a personal level -- launching a product too far ahead of the curve usually does not yield good results. All in all, living beyond the bleeding edge works for me personally, but when I am managing or investing in a start-up these days I give a lot of thought to timing -- and hopefully will get it right more often than not!