The cost of being early

Business history is usually told as a story of first movers, and the story is mostly false. The first company into a new market frequently loses it.

The pattern has a mechanical explanation. A first mover pays for discovering what customers actually want, and that discovery is not protectable. It builds the infrastructure that did not exist, trains the first workers, and persuades regulators that the category should be allowed. Every one of these costs is incurred once and benefits everyone who arrives afterwards. The second entrant inherits a market that has been explained to itself, and spends its money on execution rather than on education.

The examples are numerous enough to be boring. The first widely sold search engines, social networks, tablet computers, electric cars and video streaming services are in almost every case not the ones that dominate today. Several were technically good. They were early, which meant they were solving a problem before the surrounding conditions — bandwidth, payment systems, consumer habit — had arrived to make the solution work.

None of this means being early is a mistake. It means that being early is a bet on timing rather than on the idea, and that the two are regularly confused. An idea can be correct and still fail by a decade, and from inside the company the two failures look identical: the product does not sell.

The practical consequence for anyone building something is to ask what has to be true elsewhere for this to work, and whether it is true yet. That question is less exciting than the idea itself and it is the one that decides the outcome.