Timing

Timing, in Kyle’s corpus, is the “thread the needle” problem of building neither too early nor too late. The crispest statement comes from Todd McKinnon — Creating and Defining a New Market Category: “You have to thread the needle between building something before everyone else knows it’s obviously needed, but… not so early that it kind of falls on a world that doesn’t need it.” Okta was selling cloud security and identity — the later-adopted layers of the cloud — so the market took until roughly 2012 to catch up, despite the product working in 2011. McKinnon’s corollary is “start where there’s transition”: the most fertile time to start a company is amid a large platform shift (the move to the cloud), because that’s when the inevitable next set of needs gets created.

Timing is tightly coupled to Product-Market Fit in Kyle’s reading — the McKinnon highlights are tagged with both — because PMF isn’t just product quality but the fit between a product and a market that’s finally ready for it. The same idea recurs as “hype vs. product/market fit” elsewhere in the wiki: a thing can exist before the world is good at, or ready for, the job it does.

Where this appears

• Todd McKinnon — Creating and Defining a New Market Category — the source of the “thread the timing needle” framing; Okta’s cloud-identity market took years to catch up to a working product.
• Product-Market Fit — timing is the dimension PMF adds when a market has to be ready, not just the product good.