You're Probably Too Early
Marc Andreessen (via The Startup Archive) · 2026
"Founders are far more likely to fail from being too early — building the right idea before the infrastructure or market is ready — than from being too late, which means a founder's own sense of 'someone must already be doing this' is a poor signal to act on."
"The great founders almost always feel like they're too late, and you're almost always too early." — Marc Andreessen.
The essay's evidence is a graveyard of correctly-timed ideas executed too soon: General Magic tried to build the iPhone in the 1990s, WebVan had Instacart's model a decade early, SixDegrees predated Facebook and LinkedIn by years, Pets.com flamed out before Chewy made online pet retail viable, and the Newton preceded the iPad. In each case the vision was largely right — the problem was that supporting infrastructure, consumer readiness, or execution capability hadn't caught up yet. Andreessen's proposed heuristic: if an idea was hot 3-4 years ago but didn't quite work, you're probably right on time now.
According to Andreessen's heuristic in this essay, what suggests an idea's timing might now be right?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- You're Probably Too EarlyThe Startup Archive Daily Founder Series
Distribution Follows a Power Law
"Most startups fail from poor distribution, not a bad product — and since distribution channels themselves follow a power law, the winning strategy is to find and dominate a single channel rather than spreading thin across several mediocre ones."