There’s a popular version of startup history where a founder stumbles into a breakthrough almost by accident. Think of Silicon Valley: Richard Hendricks sets out to build a music app, only to discover that the compression technology underneath it is far more valuable than the product he thought he was creating.
That makes for great TV, but it’s not usually how it happens in the real world.
Most strong startup ideas come from spending thousands of hours inside a category to understand where the friction is, how technology is evolving in a given category, what customers keep asking for, and which assumptions are starting to break. Yes, a founder is often struck with a moment of inspiration, but that inspiration comes from putting in the years to be able to identify viable white space and come up with an idea to fill it.
Experience gives you 20/20 vision
Industry experience is often treated as the less exciting part of entrepreneurship. People like to talk about vision, originality, and disruption. But experience is what gives those things something useful to work with.
When you’ve spent years in a market, you develop a sense for which problems are temporary and which are structural. You know where the industry has settled for “good enough,” and you can also recognize when several developments that seem unrelated might actually be pointing in the same direction.
That was true for me with Performance TV. I had spent most of my career in digital advertising, watching search and social become massive performance channels, building the programmatic category from inception, and watching most digital advertising become optimizable performance media. At the same time, television was moving onto internet-connected devices. Once TV delivery became digital, the old walls and barriers around buying, measurement, and optimization became surmountable.
For me, the founding thesis for tvSci was summarized in a call to the founder of the paid search category, Bill Gross. “What if we do for CTV what we did for paid search back in the day — make it universally accessible via self-serve, and as measurable as paid search for marketers so they can buy on a ROAS basis”. So the inspiration of tvSci was rooted in decades of experience in related businesses, and the process I went through in terms of vetting the concept and the timing was so thorough that I arrived at the point where I felt I had no choice but to act.
Timing determines whether the idea can survive
Of course, recognizing where a market is heading is only half the job. A founder can be directionally right and still fail. The number one reason start ups fail is timing. I remember almost going to work for a start up that was the first streaming business, with contracts with all the studios for content, and close to 100M in investment from tier one VC and strategics. The problem was they were about 4 years too early relative to broadband adoption and went bust, just as Netflix started to transition their mail-in disc rental business to streaming. So a trillion dollar idea failed because it was just a couple of years early. Just a couple of years early.
This is one of the hardest judgments founders have to make. Move too early, and you spend years trying to force the market forward. Move too late, and the category may already belong to someone else.
The best opportunities tend to appear when several conditions line up at once: a meaningful customer problem, a major shift in technology or behavior, and enough infrastructure to support adoption. I like to think of this golden timing as a wave of inevitable disruptive change.
Conviction only takes you so far
As we were doing diligence on tvSci, I talked through the idea with potential customers, investors, and advisors. I wanted to know whether marketers would buy Performance TV, whether we could build it, and whether the market was ready. Those conversations helped me build conviction, but there was always another question I could ask.
At one point, I was talking with Kent Wakeford, a serial entrepreneur who became a non-operating co-founder of tvSci. He told me, in effect, that I had taken the research as far as it could go. It wasn’t going to get perfectly clear. I had to decide whether I was going to do it. By then, I believed enough in the idea and the timing that I felt I had no choice but to take the leap.
Startup timing can look obvious in hindsight. Once the wave is fully visible, everyone can see it. But the harder part, the one that doesn’t get as much attention, is the founder’s ability to recognize it while it is still forming, and decide whether it is strong enough to build on. And we need to recognize that this wave identification + start up business is incredibly hard — of all seed stage funded companies, only about 1% get to an exit of 500M or more.
It might look like some founders can predict the future. More often than not, they’re just catching a wave at exactly the right time. They’re paying unusually close attention to the present, then acting when the signals finally line up.
Inside Performance Advertising with Jason Fairchild delivers unfiltered insights, strategic perspective, and hard truths from inside the evolving world of adtech—cutting through the noise to focus on what really drives outcomes. Subscribe here.
