Better to Be Too Early to a Market Than Too Late

While the author is right about his particular case, it doesn't generalize to every case. A few years back I was involved in a startup that was writing software to optimize climate control systems in very large buildings. Unfortunately such buildings are usually decades old, and have antique internal networks. In many buildings, it was impossible to get the data out. (Network bandwidth problems: We wanted data from thousands of sensors every 5 minutes). They had twisted pair wiring. I'd say we were two to three decades early to market. We needed buildings to have their internal networks upgraded, and yet they had no immediate reason to do so.

I can think of plenty of companies that failed simply because they were too ahead of their times. One cannot "time" the market. However, the playbook to survive in an early vs late scenarios are different. When you are entering a market late, you don't have to work hard to educate the market. For example, Apple literally created the touch screen mobile phone segment. Android phone makers only had to sell into that hype. However, when you are entering a crowded market, you need to have a really strong go-to-market strategy because you will have to find a way to break the strangelhold that your competitors have over the coversation.

On the other hand, when you enter the market too early, you might have the "novelty" factor but it's really difficult to stay under the radar: clones show up fairly fast. So unless you are able to stay underground and still grow fast (improbable but not impossible), your early-to-market advantage is really not that big of a deal.

Finally, the size of the addressable market also plays a big role. A large market can easily support new companies that can execute better.