Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why startups succeed

Bill Gross is a founder of Idealab, he has founded many startups since he was 12 years old. Idealab is the company he founded 20 years ago, a company enables Gross to test ideas and turn the best ideas into companies. In this talk, Gross talked about the factor matters the most for startup success based on his experiences. He tried to be systematic 200 companies, 100 Idealab companies and 100 non-Idealab companies. Gross ranked those companies on five criteria, they are Idea, Team, Business model, Funding and Timing.

Gross has changed his mind after completing this study. Originally he thought that idea is the most important ingredient for a successful startup. After looking at all these companies, Gross founded out that timing is actually the biggest factor which affects success or failure(Timing accounts for 42 percent). Team comes to the second and idea is the third. He gave us some examples to support his argument. For instance, Youtube came into existence in 2006. The founder of Youtube even did not have any business model when it first started. But Youtube was started in a perfect timing, a perfect timing where broadband internet was mainstream and video codec technique was improved by Adobe Flash. On the other hand, Gross' company Z.com did survive even it had a great business model and some talent team members from Hollywood. The root cause is that broadband penetration rate and video codec technique was not ready.

Finally, Gross believed that the best way to assess timing is to really look at whether customers are ready. And to be really honest about it.