How good timing makes great products w/ Paul Orlando

**Paul Orlando** (0:00)
1964, AT&T had actually invented the first video call technology.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:05)
That's insanely.

**Paul Orlando** (0:06)
It's insane. They brought it on the market. They did like a demo at the World's Fair in 1964, and then they brought it on the market in 1970 It was a tremendous flop. The technology did work, but real problems with installed base. I've got a picture phone, but no one I know has one.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:23)
Yeah, who are you going to call?

**Paul Orlando** (0:24)
Who am I going to call? Right. Around 10 years later, McKinsey is hired by AT&T to do this market study of cellular telephony. Should we invest in this technology or not? Like what's the market size going to be by the year 2000 was the real question. McKinsey does this study and they go and they survey thousands of people and they come back with all the data and they say, get out of the market.
It's too small. There's not even going to be a million customers by the year 2000

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:54)
You're listening to The Startup Podcast. This is an educational episode.
Hi, I'm Yaniv Bernstein.

**Paul Orlando** (1:02)
And I'm Paul Orlando.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (1:04)
Every startup pitch deck is supposed to have a Why Now slide, but most founders hand wave their way through it. They've already decided what they're building and when they're building it. And the Why Now slide is just a stack of confirmation bias designed to appease investors. But that's dangerous, because in startups, timing is everything. And it's all too easy to fool yourself into thinking that now is the right time to build what you're building. You owe it to yourself to think about this properly. But how? What is the right way to assess whether you've positioned yourself to ride a massive wave to glory or be unceremoniously dumped by it? Today's guest has spent more time on that single question than almost anyone else, and he's built a framework for deciding. Paul Orlando has built four startup accelerators supporting over 300 startups in total, including Hong Kong's first accelerator and a program in Rome, run in partnership with the Vatican. I'd love to learn about that.
He co-founded his own startup out of the 2008 crash, won a TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, and has the scars to prove it. One of his own companies was an audio social app built years before smartphones were ready for it. For the past 10 or more years, Paul has taught entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California, where he also runs one of LA's largest startup incubators.
Paul has written a book called Why Now? How Good Timing Makes Great Products, which teaches his framework that he's developed to answer that Why Now question before you bet your life on the product, all of which makes Paul the perfect person to take us through today's topic. Paul, welcome to The Startup Podcast.

**Paul Orlando** (2:35)
Thank you so much. A real pleasure to be here, and thanks for that trip down memory lane with that intro.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (2:42)
I guess where I wanted to start is that this question of Why Now, there's an element of survivorship bias. I talked about confirmation bias. It's often easy in hindsight to say, well, obviously that product was built at the right time, or obviously that product was built at the wrong time. But is there a forward-looking way to do this?
Is Why Now in some sense predictable, at least in part, or is it just that story that you tell afterwards?

**Paul Orlando** (3:08)
I would always hear that question, and I'm glad you called out the Why Now slide, a pretty typical slide to include in a deck. I would see those slides, and I would hear about timing and hear things like you kind of just recounted, oh, this product was a little too early, and so they missed the market. Whenever I tried to dig in a little beneath the surface, I never really got a good explanation for that question. Well, can we do something to figure this out? Is it just a feeling?
Is it all hindsight? Is that the way that we come out with, are we on time or not? There's this good quote from Mark Andreessen, where he says, you know, those.com era startups, so we're talking 30 years ago now at this point, 25, 30 years ago.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (3:54)
Scary, scary to think it was that long ago.

**Paul Orlando** (3:56)
Yeah, I know it is.
But those startups that largely failed, it wasn't really that the ideas were bad.
It was really a question of timing. And so one of the things I did was, well, I went and I looked back at some of the.com era history. And, you know, you can find an awful lot of.com era startups where, you know, they made some noise in the 90s. It didn't work out. But then not that many years later, there's another startup that comes along and it's pretty similar to that.com era one. But now it's taking off. These are some of the big names that we know today. So, you know, whether it is, you know, delivery, social media, you know, and on, you know, there's a lot of examples where sometimes that separation is five, six, seven years or so. But then, you know, it's that question, well, could we have seen ahead of time, hey, we were a little too early for this particular concept? I think we can get some clues.