With successful tech startups its not about an idea, but timing

In the world of tech startups, what gets a new company off the ground isn’t the idea but the timing, this is according to Cal Henderson, co-founder and CTO at Slack.

Speaking to attendees at SXSW Sydney, he said while building a start up is about an idea, execution and delivery, more than anything else it is about timing.

“If we had done Slack, a couple of years earlier, we probably wouldn't have been successful in the same way. If we've done a couple of years later, somebody else would have got there before us,” he explained.

Looking at the past decade of startup successes, Henderson said that can all be drilled down to timing.

“It's a good idea and execution is important but has to be at the right time and a lot of it is luck, most of it is luck.”

Henderson said it is all about the right convergence of different factors.

“For us, it was the rise of consumer messaging, you don't send your friends and family email anymore, you use text message, iMessage, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger,” he explained.

“That mode was changing and at the same time, work was getting more complex. We're using more software in the world, we saw this space and we hit it at the right time.”

He said the best time to launch a startup is during an economic depression when founders can put their heads down to work on things.

“Right now is the scariest time to start anything new, because it's unclear how these huge technological changes are going to land and what they're going to mean,” he said.  

While many startup founders are looking to generative AI to power their products, Henderson said starting something around generative AI right now is such a “risky proposition”.

“The majority of companies that are making products or features around generative AI are going to be building something that people don't need, or that becomes a feature, table stakes, other tools or operating systems. It is such a difficult space to be in right now” he explained.

“On the other hand, it is so exciting because there's so much possibility, the possibility space is huge right now.”

Henderson said the times in his career that he had success, he had been doing things he didn’t plan to because they found adjacencies and problems he wanted to solve.

“It is about looking for spaces in between, what's there right now, looking forward and how to solve it. It's so much easier to solve problems you yourself have and that you yourself understand,” he said.

As a software engineer, Henderson explained there is a trope that software engineers have where they look at any problem outside their own lane and say “that seems easy, we can fix that with some software”.

“It's such an easy trap to fall into, as it turns out everything is so fucking complicated and everything isn't better," he said.

"If it was easy, somebody would have already done it. Find problems that you understand and you have a particularly novel solution to, it doesn't even have to be that novel.”