Lesson: Team & Culture with Dave Kashen

Step: #6 Timing Matters: Timing is part luck and part strategy

We were too early for what we were doing and I see that a lot where great idea, wrong timing. Certainly, a lot of it is luck and, I think, timing is a piece of that that's sort of luck and sort of some of the best strategists and entrepreneurs kind of get the timing.

I heard a story recently about Apple and the iPhone and the core message of the story, and I will tell the story in a second, was to minimize the amount of behavior change required by your customer. According to the story, Apple in their wisdom of this idea of not too much behavior change, what they did is they followed trends in text messaging because they hypothesized that, if people got used to typing into the phone to text, that it wouldn't be too much of a leap to them typing into Apps.

So they saw Asia was leading, so they followed this trend of text messaging in Asia. When they saw it start to tip in the mainstream, they knew it would become mainstream in Asia and then the US as well and so then they started the development of the iPhone. So timing matters.