Bill Gross of Idealab believes timing accounts for success or failure more than idea, funding or business models; the world must be ready for what you are offering. The underlying meaning of “timing” is two folded: 1) The momentum of the market is a massively scaled action that can change customers’ perceptions and behaviours, which can not be reversed by entrepreneurs’ efforts; 2) opportunity for every market entry comes with a time window.

A good example is 911. As a disastrous event, it changed public perception of security on massive scale in US. Another example is COVID-19; the outbreak of COVID-19 forced quick acceptance of remote work, learning and virtual life around the world. Both events triggered massive impacts on human perceptions and behaviours; impacts on such scale can not be intentionally created by marketing efforts of any personnel or company. We call them “Signal Events”; the momentum created by the signal events has lasting impact on market for 5-10 years. 911 triggered market for security technology; despite the stock market downturn post 911, Netscreen, a company specialized on firewall hardware technologies embraced tremendous growth and successfully went IPO.  Take 2008 financial crisis as another example; the crisis slowed economic growth and depressed liquidity, the desire for cash incentivized acceptance of sharing economy. Two major companies representing sharing economy, Airbnb and Uber, started in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Although similar business model was tested as early as 2001, sharing economy did not receive favorable market response due to wrong timing. The recent example is remote work market triggered by COVID-19, in which Zoom grew massively; trends of “remote everything” boosted growth of Robolox and the concept/business of Metaverse.

Entrepreneurs and investors need to predict the future 5-10 years from the Signal Events. For example, the world-wide currency over issue post pandemic led to emergence of financial bubbles, and the new 10 year economic cycle after the bubble means many new opportunities. The most recent example is the Ukraine war.  The geo-political conflict changed perceptions of people around the world, challenged globalization, which may bring new economic trends divided by hemispheres, and huge business opportunities.

The timing of market for Zoom – in 2011, TSVC invested in SaaSbee (Zoom’s name back then) and became its first institutional investor. Why did we invest in Zoom so early? The Signal Event started with the release of the first iPhone in 2007; in 2011, the broad use of smartphones was prophetic for the enterprise mobile market, but the market lacked a killer app for corporate use. We believed in the potential of Zoom because of the timing.