HACKER Q&A
📣 stephsmithio

If you were “too early”, were you right or wrong?


I often see companies that fail reason that they had a great idea, but they were "too early" for the market. But I wonder if being "right" at the wrong time, simply means you were wrong?

For example, I remember reading about an example where a person put together a ridesharing algorithm years before Uber and Lyft. Some people would say that person saw the future or that they were "right all along". But then there's the argument that they worked on something that had no potential at that time, ie: years before the modern cellphone was widely used.

I also know someone that had built a "cloud kitchen" a decade ago. They could've been "right", but ultimately at that time, they failed.

Maybe this thinking is too dichotomic, but I do wonder if there's a thoughtful way to consider these situations with hindsight.

  👤 lfrmgnd Accepted Answer ✓
It seems that you're relating moral judgments ("right" or "wrong") with the level of success a company achieves. A company's success is not a moral question. A company that correctly identifies a trend and scales is no more "right" than a company that correctly identifies a trend and does not scale. So someone being "too early" does not have much of anything to do with how right or wrong they are. Rather, you're talking about how being "too early" relates to the probability that you build a successful business. But what's challenging with that line of thinking is that how you evaluate the "success" of your business is relative to your goals and reference points. If I'm "early" and build a $2M company that I'm happy with, it doesn't mean I'm a failure even if I could have built a $100M business down the road. I'm happy with the $2M, or maybe I'm happy with trying to start a business that failed. It depends on the person. Finally, the success of a business is a combination of many variables, not just the timing of when you started it. There are plenty of examples of people who started businesses at the perfect time, but that simply didn't have the combination of factors required to build a successful business.
👤 simonblack
Very likely, that our 'wrongs' greatly outweigh our 'rights'. However, we tend to only remember those times we got it 'right'.

With true randomness, we'd expect that we'd be 'right' about as often as we get things 'wrong'.

👤 bsldld
Last-mover advantage matters more than First-mover advantage, according to Peter Thiel.