Let’s be honest: no one really knows why startups fail. Not you, not me, and not anyone we know. So I’m not going to pretend I know the answer to this question. But I’m going to tell you what people have told me in the Valley, and I’m going to tell you why it’s one of the startup’s biggest lie.

Take the case of my friend. His name is Yuki Nagazato, and for the past 30 years, he was a smoker. He smoked a pack a day and knew exactly what would happen to his body, his wife, and his kid. But he would not stop smoking.

Until he heard the first cry of his baby. That very instant, he stopped. Yuki was off the smoking hook, just like that.

For years, you could have told Yuki all the benefits of quitting, but he would continue lighting his next cigarette. Because Yuki Nagazato was not ready to stop, no matter what you did.

Yuki’s situation is a reflection of many failed startups that try to the solve problems that users don’t want to be solve. You could have the best product that could end smoking addiction. You could communicate all the benefits of your product, but customers like Yuki will continue to light the cigarette. You could have the best team, and the best execution, and the most funding, but your customers will continue to light their cigarettes. There is nothing you can do to stop them. Because they are not ready for you to solve their problems.

That is the startup’s biggest lie.

It’s not about the idea. It’s not about product-market fit. It’s not even about the team or funding. It’s bigger than all of those things. It’s about how ready the world is for you to solve the problem you see. It’s all about timing.

Adam Cheyer knows better than most that timing is everything. In Feb 2010, two weeks after he launched his new artificial intelligence app, Siri, in Apple’s app store, he received a phone call.

“Hey Adam, this is Steve, how are you doing?”

Thinking it was a cold sales call, Adam was about to hang up, but the caller continued.

“This is Steve Jobs from Apple. Are you free this weekend? How do you feel about coming to hang out at my house?”

Two months later, Adam sold Siri to Apple for a little over $200 million.

I am glad Adam did not hang up that call.

We know of Adam’s success. But what you probably don’t know is that Adam began his first prototype of Siri back in 1993, seventeen years before he launched Siri. The prototype was in a form of a mobile tablet similar to an iPad, with almost all the capabilities like the one that came out by Apple almost 20 years later. You could use speech recognition. There were contacts, calendars, email, and maps. You could say, “Schedule a meeting tomorrow at 6pm” – and it would work the same way Siri does today, even back in 1993, before Adam even saw a web browser. But he never launched it. He waited. And waited. Until the world was ready.

“I am convinced that if I had taken Siri’s technology and started a company before 2010, I would have failed,” said the co-founder of Siri and later the Director of Engineering in the iPhone group of Apple.

That’s what people don’t realize -- that startups need to wait for the right moment to launch. Had AirBnB not launched in Summer 2008, right during the US financial meltdown, it would have had a hell of a time convincing people to let strangers sleep on their couches. But in 2008, people were losing jobs. They needed supplemental income. And all of a sudden making $50-100 a night by letting someone sleep on a couch seemed like a good idea. The meltdown helped people take a leap of faith in sharing their apartment with a stranger. It paved the way for the unemployed in need of money to sign up as drivers for a taxi-hailing app and pick up random passengers around San Francisco, reducing driver acquisition cost and helping Uber lower taxi fare. It enabled Uber to quickly scale its supply base and become one of the largest startups in history.

Both AirBnB and Uber launched at the exact right moment. Had they launched at another time, they probably would have failed.

We in the startups ecosystem are fed the notion that we need to find the killer ideas, the best co-founders, an innovative business model, and the biggest possible war chest. And that’s the startup’s biggest lie. It makes us so distracted, so hopelessly ill-equipped to ask a more fundamental question:

“Is the world ready for us?”

Without the right timing, the customer won’t be ready for our solution and there will be no product market-fit. We won’t be able to sell our vision to the best talents and convince the best VC to invest. In addition, not only must the customer be ready, but also must the rest of the ecosystem we are relying on. Had YouTube launched before Adobe solved the codex problem and pushed broadband penetration to over 50%, it probably would not have been acquired by Google for $1.65 billion 17 months after conception.

So is founding a successful startup, then, a matter of luck? Is there no possible way to engineer our way to success?

I certainly hope not. Yes, we may not know exactly if this is the ideal time for our idea. But with relentless testing and pivoting, our users can lead us to half the answer. And with brutal honesty and disciplined self-reflection, we can lead our way to the other half.

For this reason, it is not surprising that the Lean Startup movement by Eric Ries is fathered upon Toyota Lean Manufacturing principles, which emphasize on both “go and see what’s really happening on the ground” (Genchi Genbutsu) and “relentless reflection” (Hansei). To build a successful startup, we must learn to listen to both customers and ourselves. Our customers provide us with insights to know if they are ready for our big idea. But our levelheaded instinct is what helps us learn what to embrace from our customers and what to ignore.

The startup world is a unique place. It requires us to be absurdly confident and ambitious to change the world. It also asks us to be humble enough to hear our own lies and to look within for answers.

It is where customer insight meets with founder instinct.

It is for people who know when the world is ready to be changed in order to change the world.

More to Come!

Those who have founded their own companies or work as early employees in a startup can attest to how the journey is like riding a roller coaster, except that it lasts for 3-4 years rather than 30-40 seconds. It is often extremely emotional and demands the strongest of our characters.

As a martial artist with over a decade of training and as an intrapreneur and angel investor working at and investing in tech startups in San Francisco Bay Area, I have uncovered and applied many of my Zen-based martial arts principles to the world of startup, where knowing oneself is often just as important, if not more important, than knowing one’s customers.

In the series to come, I hope to share with you a practical, no-nonsense approach that bridges my lessons learned from the tech world of Silicon Valley with the perspective obtained from the character-demanding world of martial arts.

This is where external validation meets with internal enlightenment.

This is where the 4,000 years wisdom meets the 21^st century wit.

This is where Martial Arts meet Startup.

Champ Suthipongchai

Champ currently works at 99designs, a graphic design crowdsourcing marketplace startup in San Francisco Bay Area, where he brings together his experience in innovation consulting and intrapreneurship to help the company launch a B2B arm. As an active partner at SHARP Thai City Electric, his family conglomerate in Thailand, Champ oversees strategic investment initiatives in the US and has invested into companies such as SmartBod and WeTravel as an angel investor.

Champ holds an MBA from University of California, Berkeley-Haas School of Business, and an MSE in Industrial Engineering and BSE in Electrical Engineering from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His passion in innovation and entrepreneurship together with his decade-long martial arts training has led him to start writing a guest blog in Techsauce.co. His aim is to fuse together the 21^st century Silicon Valley wits with the ancient Zen wisdoms to forge a practical yet holistic guide for entrepreneurs and life hackers living in the modern tech world. (You can follow his blog at …)