But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference?
When I look at some of the giant wins of the last major tech wave, often times the key factors in their success were external events that happened after the formation of the company. AirBnB benefitted massively from the housing bubble & financial crisis (3 years after formation), which created a large class of people who were desperate for income and whose primary residence was their primary income-producing asset. Uber had to try the idea multiple times before cell phone batteries became good enough to run navigation continuously in the car (2 years after formation), and took off because of the publicity of getting sued by San Francisco. WhatsApp took off after the addition of push notifications to iOS (~18 months after formation) made it feasible to use as a messenger rather than just a status update.
All of these companies certainly did things to influence their success, in particular having a product on the market at the time the market changed to take advantage of the product. But for most of them the product was actually wrong in the sense that it was a complete failure in the market until that market changed. Brian Chesky's fond of calling AirBnB "the worst startup idea that actually worked".
It's like the formula for success = preparedness + luck. This cribsheet does a good job at preparedness, but you have to acknowledge the role of luck if you want to actually capitalize on that preparedness, and being afraid to work on the wrong ideas will often shut you out of ideas that require some luck to work.
When I look at some of the giant wins of the last major tech wave, often times the key factors in their success were external events that happened after the formation of the company. AirBnB benefitted massively from the housing bubble & financial crisis (3 years after formation), which created a large class of people who were desperate for income and whose primary residence was their primary income-producing asset. Uber had to try the idea multiple times before cell phone batteries became good enough to run navigation continuously in the car (2 years after formation), and took off because of the publicity of getting sued by San Francisco. WhatsApp took off after the addition of push notifications to iOS (~18 months after formation) made it feasible to use as a messenger rather than just a status update.
All of these companies certainly did things to influence their success, in particular having a product on the market at the time the market changed to take advantage of the product. But for most of them the product was actually wrong in the sense that it was a complete failure in the market until that market changed. Brian Chesky's fond of calling AirBnB "the worst startup idea that actually worked".
It's like the formula for success = preparedness + luck. This cribsheet does a good job at preparedness, but you have to acknowledge the role of luck if you want to actually capitalize on that preparedness, and being afraid to work on the wrong ideas will often shut you out of ideas that require some luck to work.