The Variable That Doesn't Reward Preparation
Why market timing is the one variable that doesn’t reward preparation, and what the founders who survive it do differently.
I write for founders and executives navigating the inner game of scaling. Every week you’ll get one core idea, one tiny experiment, or one founder insight you can apply now.
Inspired by a conversation with Meg, founder of Mixies, a second-time founder who built an all-star team, shipped the product, and lined up the investment, only to watch the market decide none of it mattered.
Have you ever done everything the playbook says, built the team, shipped the product, lined up the money, and still watched it come undone?
Think about the last time something failed that should have worked.
The Belief Worth Challenging
There is a deeply held belief in the startup world that execution is the deciding factor. Build the right team. Ship fast. Raise from the right people. If you do all of those things well enough, the outcome is in your hands.
It is a comforting belief because it implies control. It suggests that if you work hard enough, smart enough, and fast enough, you can outrun whatever the market throws at you. And in most cases, execution does matter enormously. But the belief breaks down at a specific point: the point where everything you control is working and everything you do not control is not.
Meg experienced that exact break point. She had co-founders she trusted, a team stacked with talent from some of the biggest studios in gaming, a product shipped and in players’ hands, and investments locked down. The company was on what she described as a “perfect rocket trajectory.” And then the market turned, the money froze, and the company closed.
The hard truth is that timing is not a minor variable. It is often the variable. And the founders who build sustainable careers are the ones who learn to distinguish between what failed because of them and what failed because of when.
What It Actually Looks Like
Meg’s path to founding was not linear. She studied art history, wanted to be a museum curator, realized that she was ready to try something new, and pivoted to film. When she could not get hired at Sundance Film Festival because she lacked film festival experience, she did something that would define her approach to every problem that followed: she started her own nonprofit film festival in Los Angeles, partnered with Regal Cinemas, secured partnership with Air Canada to cover flights for students, and then went back and got the Sundance job.
At Sundance, she broke the fundraising record in her first year. She discovered immersive technology through the New Frontier Lab and became obsessed with virtual reality as a storytelling medium. She left for a VR studio where she produced pieces that premiered at LACMA, Venice Biennale, and South by Southwest. But the audience reach was painfully small. No one had VR headsets. She wanted to have impact at scale.
That desire led her and several colleagues to start a gaming studio focused on prosocial multiplayer games. They were trying to solve a specific problem: if virtual worlds are where younger generations do most of their socializing, what are the incentives those environments are teaching? They cold-messaged an economist on LinkedIn after reading over 200 pages of his published papers, and he became their fourth co-founder. They spent a month on daily calls, three to six hours each, to make sure the team was truly aligned before committing.
The team they assembled was extraordinary. Three of the co-founders of Call of Duty joined. They recruited from Zynga. Someone left Epic Games to work with them. They scaled to about 30 people and released their first playable build on the floor of GDC, the biggest gaming conference in the industry.
“If you have everything else and timing is not there, timing is one of the most important key things you have to success, because with timing comes so much momentum. And if you can’t get that momentum underneath you, then it’s very, very difficult.”
And then the macro environment collapsed. The post-COVID correction hit the gaming industry hard. During lockdowns, gaming had surged. When COVID lockdowns ended and people returned to normal activities, the numbers normalized, but the correction spooked publishers and investors. Roughly 15,000 layoffs swept through the industry in a short period. Studios closed their gaming arms entirely. And then Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, adding another layer of chaos. The investment Meg and team had lined up disappeared.
Meg described the weight of that moment with a clarity that most first-time founders will recognize.
“As a first-time founder who’s not had the weight of people’s livelihood on my back before, it was incredibly, incredibly hard to make that decision to close.”
She tried to exhaust every option before making the call. When the decision was final, her first priority was not grieving the company. It was helping her team. She spent months taking people to events, making introductions, and helping them network their way into new roles in an industry that was shedding jobs by the thousands.
What emerged from that process was the idea for her next company. She noticed how terrible the tools were for meeting the right people at events. She got matched with someone at a networking event who did not even speak the same language. That frustration, combined with her background in social game design, led her to co-found Mixies, an AI-powered networking platform for conferences and summits. Her current team is made up entirely of people she worked with at the gaming studio.
“Ideas die, companies die, but the connections you make, if you treat people the way people should be treated and you really value those collaborations, those continue to compound over time.”
If this resonates, forward it to a founder who needs to hear this story.
From the Coaching Room
Meg’s story is about the timing you cannot control. But in my coaching work, I see the other side of the timing problem just as often: the timing founders waste by not moving fast enough inside the window they have.
I worked with a founder who was taking two to four weeks to make critical decisions. Hiring calls would linger. Firing decisions would stall. The MVP sat in review cycles instead of reaching users. Marketing strategy got debated across multiple meetings instead of being tested in the market. None of these decisions were irreversible. But the founder was treating each one as if it were.
The shift came when we started sorting decisions by reversibility. If a decision can be undone, changed, or course-corrected, the cost of being wrong is almost always lower than the cost of being slow. A marketing test that fails gives you signal about your audience. An MVP that ships with rough edges tells you what users care about and what they ignore. The founder went from making critical decisions every two to four weeks to making them daily. Not recklessly. Deliberately.
You cannot choose when the market will open or close. But you can choose how much of the window you use. The founders who scale are the ones who refuse to let reversible decisions consume irreplaceable time.
What the Research Actually Shows
The Resources That Help You Time a Market Are Not the Same Ones That Help You Win In It
Eric Yanfei Zhao, Masakazu Ishihara, and P. Devereaux Jennings published a study in the Journal of Business Venturing in 2020, analyzing 6,544 entrant games across 78 new market spaces in the U.S. console video game industry between 1995 and 2012. They found that while relevant experience helped founders both enter markets at the right time and perform well once inside, other resources like network connections had divergent effects: they could help with entry timing but actually hurt performance, or vice versa. The implication is that timing and execution draw on different capabilities. A founder can have the right team, the right product, and the right network, and still mistime entry because the skills that drive operational success are not the same skills that drive market reading.¹
Successful Entrepreneurs Are Distinguished by Their Ability to Read Market Timing
Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner, and David Scharfstein published a study in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2010 analyzing the performance of serial entrepreneurs. They found that founders who had previously succeeded had a 30% chance of succeeding in their next venture, compared to just 18% for first-time founders and 20% for those who had previously failed. One of the key differentiators was that successful entrepreneurs exhibited persistence in selecting the right industry and the right time to start new ventures. The finding that matters for founders: timing is not pure luck. There is a learnable skill in reading market conditions, recognizing windows, and knowing when to move. But the corollary is equally important. When the window closes for reasons outside your control, that is not a failure of skill. It is the nature of the variable itself.²
What to Do When the Timing Isn’t Yours to Choose
These are practices drawn from Meg’s experience and from what the research suggests about navigating the tension between market forces and founder agency.
Sort every pending decision by reversibility.
Before letting a decision sit for another week, ask one question: if this turns out to be wrong, can I change course? If the answer is yes, the cost of delay almost certainly exceeds the cost of being wrong. Firing decisions, feature releases, pricing experiments, partnership conversations: most of these can be adjusted. The ones that cannot be reversed, equity splits, major fundraising commitments, shutting down a product line, deserve deliberation. Everything else deserves speed. If timing is the variable you cannot control, then how quickly you move on the variables you can control is the only lever you have left.
Run a post-mortem that separates the controllable from the uncontrollable.
After a failure, write two columns. In the first, list every factor that was within your control: hiring decisions, product choices, fundraising strategy, speed of execution. In the second, list every factor that was not: market contractions, regulatory changes, macroeconomic shocks, competitor timing. Be honest in both directions. Zhao’s research found that the resources driving market timing and the resources driving operational performance are fundamentally different capabilities. You can excel at one and fail at the other. If you collapse both columns into a single narrative of “I wasn’t good enough,” you lose the ability to learn what actually went wrong. The founders who improve across ventures are the ones who can look at both columns clearly and carry the right lessons forward.
Invest in your team’s careers, not just their roles.
Start before things go wrong. Make introductions for your team members that have nothing to do with your company’s immediate needs. Help them build networks that extend beyond your org chart. Advocate for their visibility in the industry, not just their output on your product. If the company survives, you will have built a team with deeper loyalty and broader capability. If it does not, you will have built a network of people who want to work with you again. Meg’s entire current team came from her previous company, not because she recruited them back, but because she spent months helping them find jobs after the closure. That kind of investment does not reset when a company ends. It compounds.
Build your next thing from whatever the last thing left behind.
After a company closes, take inventory of what survived: the skills you sharpened, the relationships you built, the problems you now understand at a level your competitors do not. These are not consolation prizes. They are unfair advantages that only exist because of what you went through. Meg’s prosocial game design expertise became the foundation for an AI networking platform. The specific pain of watching broken matchmaking tools fail her former colleagues became the product insight no competitor had. When timing closes one door, the founders who recover fastest are the ones who audit what they are carrying and build from that, not from a blank page.
The Bigger Picture
The research tells one side of this story. Zhao and his colleagues found that the capabilities driving market timing and the capabilities driving execution are fundamentally different. Gompers and his colleagues found that reading market timing is one of the skills that distinguishes serial entrepreneurs who succeed. But the research does not tell you what to do on the Tuesday morning when you are sitting on three decisions you have been avoiding for two weeks. That part is simpler and harder: recognize that the market window is not waiting for you to feel ready, and move on the things you can control while you still have the chance.
Meg’s story is not a cautionary tale about bad luck. It is a case study in what it looks like to have genuine skill, genuine preparation, and genuine team quality meet a market force that does not care about any of those things. She built an extraordinary team, shipped a product, broke records, and lined up investment. The market turned. The company closed. And then she took the people, the insight, and the pain and built something new.
“So much value grew out of this, even though it didn’t end exactly how I wanted it to.”
There will be variables you cannot control. The market will move on its own schedule. Investors will spook for reasons that have nothing to do with your product. Industries will contract at the exact moment you were ready to expand. None of that is a verdict on your ability.
The founders who build lasting careers are the ones who learn to move fast inside the window they have, carry forward what survives when the window closes, and refuse to let the timing they could not control become the story they tell about themselves.
Founder Circle
There’s probably a decision in this essay you recognized as one you’ve been sitting on too long. Founder Circle is a live, small-group coaching session where ten founders each work through one real challenge and leave with clarity they didn’t have walking in. Join us for our next circle by reserving your spot.
P.S. If this topic resonated, pick up Morgan Housel’s Same as Ever. His argument that luck and risk are the same force, just viewed from different directions, is one of the clearest frames I’ve found for understanding why timing defies preparation.
What is the last decision you delayed that, looking back, you could have made in a day? I read every response.
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC) and founder of Little Pursuits. I partner with founders and executives through the leadership inflection points: the identity shifts, the hard conversations, the decisions you keep carrying alone. This newsletter is where that work meets the page.
If you want to go deeper to check out the references used in our research:
¹ Zhao, E. Y., Ishihara, M., & Jennings, P. D. (2020). Strategic Entrepreneurship’s Dynamic Tensions: Converging (Diverging) Effects of Experience and Networks on Market Entry Timing and Entrant Performance. Journal of Business Venturing, 35(2).
² Gompers, P. A., Kovner, A., Lerner, J., & Scharfstein, D. S. (2010). Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship. Journal of Financial Economics, 96(1), 18–32.