Having just read Chris Dixon’s post on Timing your Startup, my brain is trying to connect his ideas with those from Black Swan. It’s very easy to look back and say that YouTube was a success because the timing was right. But at the inception of YouTube, I bet that Chen and Hurley didn’t have any better proof of timing than any other social video sharing founders had before them. In fact, they all probably thought the timing was right - for legitimate reasons of their own - and simply couldn’t predict any better than anyone else.
Dixon points this out directly:
Often the necessary conditions are only beginning to emerge and knowing when they will do so sufficiently is very hard to predict.
To mitigate timing risk when betting on emerging trends, Dixon recommends keeping burn low and runway long. This also has the effect of exposing your startup to positive black swans. While you perform customer validation, and work on the product market fit, you will continue to pivot the business. If the emerging trends don’t pan out as you predicted/hoped, it’s good to still be in building mode. If the trends do emerge, and your product can ride that tide, you may happen upon a black swan and become one of those “obvious in hindsight” successes.
In eight days my company, Overtime Media Inc., creators of TeamHomeField.com will be 3 years old (according to some document in a filing cabinet somewhere in Delaware). We’ve only seen white swans on our travels to date, but that doesn’t mean we won’t find a black one. I’ve got my eyes open. :-]
