Phil Libin explains when to launch a startup: wait until a big problem shifts from impossible to merely very hard. He used this rule for Evernote, which became possible when smartphones and ubiquitous connectivity arrived. Start too early or too late and you'll likely fail.
Wait until the world changes so that an important problem goes from impossible to just really hard, then execute. Fits into 140 characters. Wait until the world changes so that an important problem goes from being impossible to just being really hard, and then execute. And I think this is actually kind of important. It doesn't mean that you literally have to— have an idea and then wait for maybe 80 years for this to be true. But it does mean that whatever idea you think you have, you should run against this test. You should say, why is right now the best timing? What is it about my idea that was impossible before, and what is it about the world that's changed that's making my idea just barely possible now? And of course, the other important part here is the word important. It should be a sufficiently important idea. If your idea is not sufficiently important, then you're wasting your life. You shouldn't work on it. If your idea was not impossible before, it was possible before, then you've got to ask yourself the very honest question, why is this still an opportunity? Why haven't other people done it? And if the idea is actually no longer impossible, no longer really, really hard, it's just kind of easy, then it's probably too late. So if you get this wrong in either direction, you're kind of bad. If you start something— if you start your idea when it's literally still impossible, you know, you're going to waste some time. You're not going to succeed. You're going to reduce your chances of success from 1% to 0%. If, on the other hand, you wait until things are, yeah, it's actually trivial, then it's probably too late as well. So every idea that you have if you're thinking about making a company around that, I would run it through this test. And we certainly did that with Evernote. So with Evernote, we said we want to build a second brain for people. We want to build a system to make everyone smarter. And by everyone, we mean almost everyone on the planet. And we thought that that was impossible 5 years ago because the way that technology had advanced, it was impossible, we thought, to build a productivity software that that would be mainstream. Everything was kind of nichey. But we thought that changes— 5 years ago when we were just getting started, 6 years ago, smartphones we thought were just about to hit, social networks were just getting big, networking was getting ubiquitous, and we thought, OK, this combination of technologies actually makes this important idea, and it takes it from being impossible to solve for everyone to just really, really hard. And we thought, OK, that's the good timing, and we can jump into it. And I think lots of other— Lots of other ideas you can, after the fact, which is, you know, the best way to rationalize anything, go back and fit this in.
