DOMOPALOOZA: TIMING--AND LUCK--KEY TO STARTUP SUCCESS.

AuthorChristensen, Lisa
PositionAround Utah

Salt Lake City -- For every success story to come out of Silicon Valley, there are countless startups that dwindle into obscurity. But for Matt Cohler, success comes down to a simple--if elusive--formula.

"I think it was a combination of the entrepreneur, the product they're building, and the way they're taking the product to market, and last but not least, timing: what's going on in the world," said Cohler, general partner at Benchmark, at Domopalooza 2018. "I think if you come in at a time when there's a shift in platform, that opens up a lot of opportunities."

Cohler knows Silicon Valley success; he's been involved early on with a laundry list of household names: Linkedln, Facebook, Uber, Instagram and Snapchat, for which he was the first investor. The secret to being involved with all of those thriving companies is somewhat less complicated than the secret to entrepreneurial success.

"That was basically really, really good timing and really, really, really good luck. Not all [luck] but 99.999999 percent," he said. "Luck is 99 percent of most things, and if you don't realize that, you're fooling yourself. Timing is everything, too."

Cohler first came to Silicon Valley in 2002, before working on the internet was considered a reliable or lucrative path to success. He found his way into the then-tiny staff of Linkedln, which succeeded where other professional social networking sites had failed because of a few key differences. The timing was significant, Cohler said, but founder Reid Hoffman also made some key decisions that helped make the difference. Among those differences was the omission of profile pictures--a feature that had caused earlier competitors to disintegrate into dating sites.

"Once it was established and once norms were established, of course we can add profile pictures, but it was important not to have those Day One," said Cohler.

It took some times for Linkedln to gain traction--Hoffman heavily utilized his first users in a way that Cohler characterized as, "this process of very unscalably clawing your way to a point where it tips into being useful." Because it took so long to grow, Cohler said, many people think Facebook was established earlier, despite being a year younger.

By the time Facebook launched in 2004, Linkedln had enough growth that Cohler found himself becoming superfluous, he said, but...

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