April 11, 2023

The Paul Orlando Hypothesis: Great Product Strategy Answers The Why Now Question

In this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we cover how to know when to pivot, answering the Why Now question as a startup, and building startup incubators and accelerators.

The Paul Orlando Hypothesis: Great Product Strategy Answers The Why Now Question
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Holly Hester-Reilly
Holly Hester-Reilly

Paul Orlando helps organizations unlock new revenue and partnership opportunities, getting companies to solve problems that they couldn't in other ways. He has built startup programs around the world (Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Rome, and remote). Paul also teaches at the University of Southern California.

In this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we cover knowing when to pivot, answering the Why Now question as a startup, and building startup incubators and accelerators.

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Resource Links

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Questions we explore in this episode

How did Paul's startup pivot to focus on doctors and long-term recovery challenges?

  • Paul and his team discovered that their mass market consumer product had a retention problem and people were not returning to the app after trying it out.
  • They received inbound requests from external businesses that wanted to use their product in a different way, specifically in a closed-off version that could be used with their own customers or patients.
  • They discovered that they had built something that fit within a HIPAA compliant model, and this led them to pivot to focus on doctors and support group leaders who had patients going through a serious illness or recovery process.

How does Paul approach the Why Now question for startups?

  • Paul became interested in understanding timing and hitting the market at the right time after his experience with his startup.
  • He conducted research and found that there were certain drivers and clues to good timing, and he focused on tracking these factors.

How did Paul get involved in building startup accelerators and incubators?

  • Paul discovered that he enjoyed running founder Roundtable series in New York and wanted to make it a bigger part of what he did.
  • He looked for a new market to go into and discovered that there was no startup accelerator in Hong Kong, where he had spent time in the past.
  • He took a scouting trip to Hong Kong and met with local startup community members to explore the potential for building a startup accelerator, then moved to Hong Kong and ran an accelerator there.

Quotes from this episode

What I discovered was I think the approach or the belief was, Hey, Hong Kong is just like New York, but in Asia. So I can take something that works in, some other, place in the us. I believe these are all US-based accelerators, and I'll just pop it into Hong Kong and I'll replicate, I'll scale my own, program that way. But places are very different from each other…as a result, I ended up making a program that was very different, rather than saying oh, I'm just gonna take something that works in Silicon Valley, in Los Angeles, whatever, and just, pop it into a new place.
The Why Now question that I feel like comes up a lot. with early stage startups, if you are say pitching for investment there's even like a famous kind of like template and a Why Now slide is like one of those say 10 slides if you're doing a formal pitch…But at the same time, I haven't really seen anybody dive deeply into this topic. So what qualifies good timing? Like how do I know if I have it?
We also look at previous failed examples or maybe like partial successes and then what's going on today. And out of that whole process you end up having this deep kind of understanding of. Okay, why this didn't work in the past, what drivers are actually, converging to position, your specific business so that it's gonna be able to take advantage of this, this new world that's emerging. And as a result you can either present this very clearly to a potential investor, or if you're, in a larger organization, on a product team, you could say, okay I actually think we should double down on this one. I think, in the next year that the time is going to be right for this type of product, or, the way that we're doing this.

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Transcription

 Hi, and welcome to the Product Science Podcast where we're helping startup founders and product leaders build high growth products, teams, and companies through real conversations with people who have tried it and aren't afraid to share lessons learned from their failures along the way. I'm your host, Holly hesta, Riley founder and c e o of Hqr product science.

This week on the Product Science Podcast, I'm sharing a conversation with Paul Orlando. Paul helps organizations unlock new revenue and partnership opportunities, getting companies to solve problems that they couldn't in other ways. He has built startup programs around the world, including Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Rome, and Remote.

Paul also teaches at the University of Southern California. Welcome, Paul.

Thanks, Holly. Really excited to be here.

I'm super excited to have you. So I'd love to hear about your journey. How did you get into startups?

So for me it was, I would say a lot of coincidences happening. I started out early in my say, working life with very big organizations, and it seemed like over the years I got into progressively smaller and smaller organizations, which I had fun in both extremes, but I literally got into startup 10, 12 years ago now, when I had a group of friends, we used to get together every week or so, get a few beers and we would end up talking about different startup ideas or business ideas. After doing that for about a year, I think we started zoning in on one idea that we all became passionate about, and we just committed to actually trying to build it.

And so this was a startup that was in some ways, like a precursor to a clubhouse. Okay. But if you imagine it was. A two G world, so not like a 5G world or 4G world. That clubhouse emerged in in the beginning based on getting total strangers to have a spoken conversation with each other. And then we actually ended up discovering, well, that was fun to do once, but there was no continuity.

There was no reason to go back again, and we ended up pivoting to more of an enterprise service. So we primarily. A doctor or support group leader type of customer who had their own patients that they were managing, patients, going through a serious illness, a recovery process that was long and isolating, and this group of actual end customers, they missed that human interaction.

And so for them having a voice conversation with. Somebody else who's going through a similar experience was actually really powerful and helped their recovery process. But yeah, that is the literal first experience I had in a startup environment.

Yeah. So tell me more about that. How did you end up pivoting to the doctors and the long-term recovery challenges?

How did you find that problem space?

By it knocking us over the head because we didn't wanna do it at first. If you imagine, and maybe some of your listeners have also had this experience, like you've already spent significant time talking about the ideas, you've convinced yourself that you're really on the right track.

You've spent significant time actually building it and then testing it. We were testing incorrectly. I'll say I only knew that afterwards, but all signs are pointing to, Hey, we are correct. We just need to, you know, keep going forward. But a couple things happened, and maybe this kind of hits some of your listeners as well.

So the first thing that happened once we made that. Mass market, consumer aversion of our world, startup available. The metrics very quickly told us that we are on the wrong track. And the key metric there was a retention metric. So people would join, they would sign up, we could get signups, they would try it out, they would have a first conversation.

The feedback was also very positive cuz we've collected feedback. And I'll also say just based on say, a length of conversation metric. Back then it was about 10 minutes. And if I think, hey, talking 10 minutes to a random stranger about some topic, that seems pretty. But people would not come back. And once we started to dive into that, it became clear, Hey, this was a fun thing to do once, maybe twice, but I'm not gonna live on this service.

I'm not going back every single day. And so it became clear that even if we could widen the top of the funnel and draw in 10 times more people, it's still like a very leaky bucket. We're losing people just as fast as they're coming. You can't build a social product. So basically we had three inbound requests that convinced us we should change our market focus.

We had a few different external businesses that contacted us and said, Hey, we'd like to use what you have built, but in this different way, walled garden versions, or rather than open this up to the world. At that point, we had been in the New York Times, we had gotten some awareness. But these other businesses really wanted to do like a closed off version of it that they could use just with their own, say customers or in the case of the health application of their patients.

And coincidentally, we discovered, hey, we have something that fits within a HIPAA compliant model.

That's it. That's like a big coincidence.

That's, yeah, it was a very happy coincidence because, We did not come from healthcare or health tech, but we were not thinking about this, and we discovered we had built something that we protected the privacy.

So we actually went through, in terms of the product aside, we spent a lot of effort in the beginning thinking about and trying to test should we allow people to choose who they. Speak to. So should we show a profile picture? Should we show like a name even should we just allow you to choose, hey, I wanna talk to male, female, age range, any of those?

Maybe I'll say like normal ways that you might select and filter people. And we ultimately decided no. And I'll tell you. The very numbers driven reason we got to that point was I did a test on Skype, so I don't know if people really use Skype anymore, but was a big thing in the past. But they used to have a feature called Skype Me Mode, which they discontinued, I'll say at least 10 years ago, but we're at the tail end of this, and it was the setting that you could put yourself in, which allowed you to receive inbound IMS or even a direct call from.

You could just be discovered and say, Hey, I'm bored. I want to talk to a random stranger. I'm choosing you. I created two profiles, no profile picture, just like the blank setting. We were in New York at the time, so I think the names were like rando, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or something like that. And then one digit off, two different profiles, both the same age.

The only difference was one was male, one was female, and those are all filters that you can search for in that skypeing me mode. And I just let them run for 24 hours each one in 24 hours. The mail profile received one inbound chat from somebody and I thought, Hey, maybe this is actually pretty good because one person randomly tries to contact you in a day.

Maybe that's actually like a good sign if there's nothing else there that's drawing you to this individual, but the. Female profile received 84 inbound requests and messages, and to be honest, about a third of them were like rude. So it became very clear, okay, we should not let people choose who they connect to because it just changes the reason people are connecting and it actually can reward behavior we don't want. So we took that all away. And as a result, we did collect things like age, gender, in the signup process, but we never showed that in terms of who are you talking to? And we discovered then, just by looking at length of time that people would talk that there was no difference between male connection, female connection, and male female connection.

And so that told us, okay, by stripping that away, we actually made the user experience about the conversation rather than about, oh, I want to talk to a girl or. And that also fit very well with the health application. So that was the process. It was, Hey, we are brilliant. We're on the right track. Oh no, the metrics are telling us we're not.

And then being lucky, getting these inbound requests and then being able to pivot to a different type of customer.

Yeah, that's a great story. I love hearing that you were able to test the male and female profiles and see what's different, and then to respond when you got the feedback from the market where people were sending you inbound saying, Hey, can we use this for something else?

It's really smart that you followed that. So once you got those inbounds where they were saying, Hey, can we use this? Did you do some discovery work to try to understand better what it was that they were trying to solve?

I'll say partway the discovery. Did was primarily with the doctors or support group leaders.

When we tried talking to patients, actually we discovered people are not comfortable with that. In fact, we had one patient population that was actually a very specific group that. We did talk to a few people with, and we discovered that actually they were much more comfortable just going through remaining anonymous even to us, but going through their own group leader, that was fine.

So in some ways it actually made that discovery process a little easier because I was talking to relatively few people, but getting a much bigger impact. I talked to one person, doctor, or support group leader, they would have 50 or a hundred patients that would be, say, managed under their care. And it also just simplified.

I think that whole experience for us, we probably would've been, I would actually say like a little slower to learn if we had to. Try to get access to the patient populations where there's some resistance, and instead being able to aggregate under those support group leaders was, I think something that made it a little easier.

They also cared about different things than the patients, but ultimately the patients would not pay for this. But there was a budget for a support group or a doctor to pay for such a thing. That also simplified just that who's the actual end customer Who is going to pay for this? Oh, okay. It's better if we a.

Yeah. So it sounds like you were talking to the buyers. Yep. And the actual product was gonna have users who might be not the buyers as well as I'm sure the buyers were probably engaging with it in some form. That's right. And so you did the research with the buyers. So tell me more about what happened after that.

So you pivoted to this area and did the metrics get better?

They did. So we went from a 10 minute average call to a 45 minute call. So that's one very clear sign for me saying, wow, a 45 minute conversation with a stranger. But where, hey, we both have something that's life changing in common. It said, okay, we're on the right track.

Also, no real difference between male female kind of connections. And the important thing was now it's like something that I do. So every week I'm gonna do this. And the metrics that were important to the doctors or the group leaders were not. Okay, did they show up? Did they actually have the conversation?

But after the conversation, we were able to then push out other information. So it could be, here is a survey, or here is this week's health goals for you, so let's hit these points. It was even thumbs up, thumbs down. How did you like talking to this other person, but changed the way that we had to be concerned moving from mass market consumer. Oh, really? About retention and maybe the connections themselves are not as meaningful to the other extreme. Really long conversations with high retention and where the goal is people are getting healthier. Over time and we can track that. Did you show up the next week? Did you actually follow through on these health goals?

Here's one more way for me to make sure that you see this information that's easy for patients to get lost in that whole system. But I'd say it was that experience of going through that started to make me very interested in how startups or how founders figure things out and often don't figure things.

And run out of time. But it was that experience that led me to, I'd say get more interested. So I got my recent kind of focus area is how do you understand timing and hitting the market at the right time and what are clues or drivers of good timing? How do you like track such things? But it clued me into that and especially we were talking about clubhouse, the beginning of this, we're comparing it a lot of what we had to do technologically difficult back then, and there was no way to do a clubhouse, exact cologne in the decade past. You couldn't have a thousand people on a conversation like this, and the app stores were relatively new, but you're in a two G world, maybe starting of a, like a 3G world. Like you couldn't do a lot of these things, like the call quality would suffer.

Like people are not on high speed internet as much on their phones. So a lot of those problems. They disappeared by the time clubhouse popped up. Yeah. But it did have the same kind of problem with retention. Hey, this is fun to do, but for a little while or during the pandemic, I don't have a lot of other opportunities to be entertained or to like communicate with people.

Yeah, I do this new thing, but eventually I just get tired of it and I, I churn. I go and do something else.

Yeah. Hey, so I'm gonna interrupt us here for our first ever sponsor. It's product board, a software for product managers. In a previous episode, we introduced you to Miro Reas from products board. In this episode, I asked him how they process all of the feedback that comes in through different channels from their customers.

And here's what he had to say.

There was times when we, as a product managers had to do the triaging. So basically every PM was going through all the feedback and based on certain internal rules, was assigning this feedback to individual product managers. Actually build, uh, functionality, the insights automation.

So basically you can define a rule based on which the feedback is automatically forwarded to the right inbox of individual PMs. So there is less time spent on the feedback coming to the right PMs at this moment. And I spend more time on actually. Reading feedback that reaches to me automatically. The automation rules, they're fairly flexible, so it could be based on the title of the node, based on the content, based on a tag assigned, based on the source of the feedback that's coming in.

There are various options you can pick and choose from. And these could be all combined together. This actually highly depends on the stage of the product process. When you're trying to just get a sense of what's happening out there, typically you take all the feedback and try to assign it to the right high level buckets from time to time.

There might be interesting insights that you wanna follow up with the customer specifically. So you set up, you try to reach out to him and her, set up a meeting and go more into details. But it's typically. Later on, once the opportunity gets a green light, when we try to dive more into needs of our customers, during those times, we actually pinpoint use cases or problems of our customers, try to reach out to those swimmers from whom we received feedback, set up an interview, and this way, expand on the initial request from the customer.

It's impossible for us to respond to every single customer, but rest sure. We are taking all the feedback seriously and documenting in in the right buckets.

So that's what Miro had to say about how product board processes the feedback that comes in from customers. Now back to our interview.

So before we dive into the timing question, which I'm definitely eager to dive into with you, I do wanna know with the startup that you were running and the pivot that you made, was that bootstrapped or venture funded?

So it was bootstrapped, we started doing this 2009 to 2011. Tough time to raise money. Yeah. We had some revenue from the paid customers that were coming in, we could have trimmed off say that first or a good chunk of that first year and say, had the insight to start with a business application rather than a consumer application.

Or if we had been maybe a little luckier, I think we could have made it into something bigger. But in the end, this is probably an experience that people have had in early stage. I had a co-founder. He was the guy who wrote most of the code, who actually ended up getting pretty sick himself. It was coincidental that we were in a kinda a health tech world, but he ended up not really being able to work.

As much. And to be honest, it was an okay business. It wasn't like an amazing business. We didn't feel like it made sense to try to like find somebody who could step into his shoes. So we let it just run.

Mm-hmm.

And it basically didn't require much maintenance. We had people paying for it, we let it just keep running and then we went our own ways.

In a different funding climate, maybe things would've been different. Maybe it could've continued on, or we'd have had more runway to try to build something different for the more powerful, maybe for the health applications. But it just got me interested in how people figure things out. And I had a lot of other friends who were going through that same process.

Yeah. So like my next step out of that was I started running a founder Roundtable series in New York. Okay. And I. Eight or 10 founders around the table, and in the beginning before I met any of them, I thought, oh, this is gonna be like module one to 10. This is gonna be like serious education. We're gonna go through these steps.

What I discovered when I met everybody for the first time was people really just wanted to talk and exchange experiences with other, funny to say, maybe 10 person startup or something. You basically have an early stage role where you're in charge of product or a business side, and people really just wanted to like exchange stories, hear how others had dealt with something, bring up, Hey, this is what I'm dealing with now.

What do you guys think? They wanted that type of exchange and that's what it became. And I kept doing, I was just continuing to get encouraged to do another batch. So I did this, I think with six different groups, so maybe. 50 or 60 over about a year, and then skipping ahead, it kind of took me into that next focus area that I've had for that last 10 years, which is building startup accelerators or incubators.

Mm-hmm.

It was like a, an intermediate step to doing that.

Yeah. So how did you get involved? Like how did that grow to building startup accelerators or incubators?

So I realized that I liked that type of work. I wasn't thinking of it as work, it was just something I was doing on the side. But I discovered I really enjoyed that and I wanted to make it a bigger part of what I did.

So back then, so this is, I guess 2011, New York already had. 10 startup accelerators, and I didn't think it made sense to try to build the 11th one. So I was actually looking for a new market to go into. I had worked for a little while earlier in my career in Hong Kong, and so I was thinking like, okay, what are other places?

If it's not New York City, what's another place that this might work in terms of building a startup accelerator? And I discovered, okay, there's no accelerator in Hong Kong. I wonder what the local startup community is like. I cold emailed a bunch of. Who I found online actually got into a few conversations and was starting to think, I think there's something there.

And I took a scouting trip over for a couple of weeks where I literally just met as many people as I could, got introduced to a ton of people as well. And I came away thinking there is enough pent up demand for some type of startup program. It's also, or it used to be not really. It used to be like an easy place to attract people and yeah, move there for three months for this program and maybe you go back to your home country afterwards or maybe you stay, but easy place to get people to relocate temporarily.

And then I also discovered in a process that I could get some government support. So all those things together, I kept that conversation going. I went back to New York for maybe about six months, but kept those conversations going and in the process ended up putting together a little pilot of this program.

And then after demonstrating some results, I was able to find a corporate backer who actually put the money in for a small fund to do the investments of the actual funded accelerator program.

So what kind of results did you show that convinced the corporation to put the.

One that I could attract people.

Cause I was able to get applications in. I did a demo day back then. You've met people when they entered. Now you see them later on when they're presenting what they have been doing, the results that they have. And for this specific backer, it was a company called telerik. They made developer tools and also a specific set of tools for mobile app.

So we actually created a program that was themed around hybrid HTML five, the mobile app development. And for them it was partly, Hey, I get this almost like market research into seeing what a bunch of early stage companies are doing with, are they actually choosing our tools or not? Cause it wasn't like mandated that they had to use one set of developer tools, but I get access to these early stage companies to see how they work.

I can watch them in more. I ever would before might be more valuable than simply doing a marketing campaign and trying to like push out education on the same toolkit. So the metrics were maybe a little loose as I think they have to be early stage. But yeah, that was the way we edged that and getting awareness and just demonstrating, Hey, I can get applications from all over Asia Pacific. And then even we were bringing people in. We had people from the us, from Europe come in in the later cohort. Hmm.

Oh, cool. One thing I'm just curious about is, were the programs in English or did you speak the language?

They were in English.

I mean, we had people from, I forget how many different countries, but yeah, we needed some common language to communicate in and yeah.

Yeah. I think it's really brave of you. I guess you'd lived in Hong Kong before, but to just realize that you could do what you're enjoying, but in a different market and go across the world to do.

Wow. Yeah.

The other spin that I'll say was, So I discovered that there were a handful of other international groups that kind of showed up and made some noise about building an accelerator in Hong Kong. So like a little before I arrived and they all pulled out in the end.

Oh, why?

So I discovered the reason, cause I talked to some people and they're like, oh, I've heard this before.

You're just like the next person coming in and you're not gonna actually do it. Yep. So what I discovered was, I think the approach or the belief was, Hey, Hong Kong is. New York, but in Asia. So I can take something that works in some other place in the US I believe these are all US-based accelerators and I'll just pop it into Hong Kong and I'll replicate, I'll scale my own program that way.

But places are very different from each other, so, well, one of the twists on where talent was coming from, at least locally, was university system in Hong Kong set up very differently than say what we might be used to in the. If you're studying computer science or design, it's almost, you weren't good enough to qualify to study law or business or medicine.

People get pushed into different disciplines as a result of like test scores at a, like a university entrance. The other difference, and I saw this directly because in that first pilot I ran, I had a team that thought, oh, this is great. Two computer science grads from university in Hong Kong. Right before the start, they quit.

I said, I don't understand. You were so excited and we've been talking about this. What happened? Our parents are making us get real jobs because what is typical anyway in Hong Kong is the kids live with their parents until you get married. But whenever that is, and you're expected to contribute to the family finances.

So if you say, Hey, I'm gonna go off and do this startup, and I have no idea when I'm ever gonna be paid, that's really tough. And the parents will actually want you to have a business card that people recognize the logo. So we discovered, yeah, a lot of the, say local Hong Kong founders back then, they were outlier cases.

They were just like a little, not in the center mainstream, but the startup community. And I know this has changed a lot, but the startup community, like back then also was pretty international. So there would be people who maybe their significant other relocated to Hong Kong. For some reason. They were coming along, but they were working remotely and they had this side startup that they were doing, or they just discovered, Hey, I wanna live in a different place for a while and I can do that on a tourist visa and I'm just gonna show up and I'm gonna work on my startup or side gig, and Hong Kong's a fun place to be for a while.

Now I'm gonna go somewhere else. So as a. I ended up making a program that was very different rather than saying, oh, I'm just gonna take something that works in Silicon Valley, in Los Angeles, whatever, and just pop it into a new place.

Sounds like you were responsive to the market and the market needs, which is really great.

I wanna switch gears and get over to the conversation about the timing because I wanna make sure we have enough time for that. What have you learned? You've been doing this stuff for a while and I think you've seen some things where the timing wasn't right and yeah, obviously I'm sure observed things where the timing was right.

So what are your key ways of looking at it?

A few things. So this timing question that I feel or the why now question that I feel like comes up a. Certainly with early stage startups, if you are say pitching for investment, there's even like a famous kind of like template and a why now slide is like one of those say 10 slides if you're doing a formal pitch.

A lot of people talk about the importance of timing and if you even go, like I, I've seen research where there was like, A survey of I think 800 VCs and asking them about the most important qualities in successful and failed investments and like timing is in like the top couple, if we're both most successful or and failed.

But at the same time, I haven't really seen anybody dive deeply into this topic. So what qualifies good timing? Like how do I know if I have it? So I'm approaching this not because I just want anybody to look better and be able to like tell a story, but I actually think, okay, there's something here that we can understand a little more deeply.

And it's not only maybe good when you're raising money, but it's just good strategy. You might decide to put resources behind different products at different times. The way I've been approaching this has been doing a few things. So I've been just doing a lot of research, a lot of reading, looking at.com era startups that have failed, that have modern, very similar companies that are doing very well, and you can make these comparisons and say, okay, what was the reason that same idea basically just didn't work in the past and now is doing really?

Maybe some part of that is bad management decisions, but that can't be a hundred percent. And so I ended up going through a number of examples and coming up with a list of drivers that I'm tracking. It's a long list. I've got 12 of these that I'm tracking. But everything from change on tech side, regulatory side, economic demographic, and even like a crisis one.

But so my process and I've been running what I call like why now workshops and doing this with. Startup accelerators. I do this in one of the classes I teach at usc.

Mm-hmm.

I'm started to do this now with later stage businesses that just have a larger product portfolio and they're just trying to understand, okay, where might we see more growth and how do we wanna position ourselves as a result?

But I go through this list of drivers with them. We come out, when we pull out the, maybe the handful that are relevant in their situation, we then understand how do these drivers work? So is there something maybe that's semi predictable about this? So for example, on the tech side, this might be related to Moore's law.

Maybe we can make some reasonable projections for how like a cost structure is gonna change. The cost of storage pace is declining. At what rate or people are getting access to higher speed bandwidth at what? We try to map out how these drivers are gonna work in their situation, and then I do what I call a timing map that kind of puts together those drivers.

We also look at previous failed examples or maybe partial successes, and then what's going on today. And out of that whole process, you end up having this deep kind of understanding of, okay, why this didn't work in the past. What drivers are actually. Converging to position your specific business so that it's gonna be able to take advantage of this new world that's emerging.

And as a result, you can either present this very clearly to a potential investor, or if you're in a larger organization, not a product team, you could say, okay, I actually think we should double down on this one. I think in the next year that time is going to be right for this type. Or the way that we're doing this.

But yeah, that's been my process in going through this. I've found it just puts people in a different way that they're used to. Cuz there are like, there's so many models and methodologies to try to help you evaluate, okay, do I go down this path or a different path? And this is, I think one that tends to be relevant I think in just about any situation where there is some change in the world and yeah, hits people differently.

Yeah, no, I think it's really great because one of the areas that I see a lot of product leaders and startup founders, I see. Big impact on whether they're successful or not. And sometimes they're not paying enough attention to it is what are the trends going on around them in the world at large? And sometimes I've gone into companies that have been very successful and looked at what they're doing and said, wow, I cannot believe this team was so successful.

And then I step back and I say, well, they were successful because they hit on a really big trend in the world. And it doesn't matter whether they are good at operating or just good enough, but they hit the right trend and so they got it right. So, People see that is really huge. So that makes a lot of sense.

And yeah, I think that's, uh, really valuable work.

That's it.

Unfortunately, we're running out of time. How can people find you if they wanna learn more?

So you can look me up, you can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. My website is startups unplugged.com and that's where I've posted most of the writing on like why now or timing.

So you could go there and you could read about drivers of timing or you could see a put up a post of 50 examples. Startup, why now? Slides and other ways that people have looked at the timing internally and the way I make timing maps and run. Why now sessions. So you can check that out. Startups and unplug.com.

Great. Thank you so much, Paul. It's been a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you.

Thanks, Holly. It was great speaking with you as well.

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