Cartoon: Timing
“Timing” by Ian Foley
This new cartoon illustrates how getting market timing and positioning right can be one of the primary determinants of success for businesses.
Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab and a serial entrepreneur, surveyed 200 start-ups and found that the key difference between successful and failed start-ups was timing, which accounted for 42% of the difference between success and failure. This is followed by the team (32%), idea (28%), business model (24%) and funding (14%).
This can be seen even in the current hype around artificial intelligence (AI) companies. According to Brendan Burke, a senior emerging technology analyst at PitchBook, data suggests that “investor momentum will be on early-stage start-ups in this new wave of AI rather than supporting late-stage vendors” and those using more classical (and older) models.
High valuations are being driven by recently formed start-ups such as Tome (which raised a $43 million Series A round at a $257 million pre-money valuation) and Anthropic (which raised a $300 million Series C round at a valuation of $4 billion), as well as early-stage AI start-ups addressing use cases like software, customer experience, and media generation.
Those with the best market timing and positioning are companies that had the foresight (or were lucky) to be in-market with product market fit to use the capital to win market share, rather than the new crowd who have piled into a more competitive market.
You can find more of Ian’s cartoons here.
