So take a wild success like Airbnb / that everybody knows about. // Well, / that company was famously passed on / by many smart investors / because people thought, / "No one's going to rent out / a space in their home / to a stranger." // Of course, / people proved that wrong. // But one of the reasons it succeeded, / aside from a good business model, / a good idea, / great execution, / is the timing. // That company / came out / right during the height of the recession / when people really needed extra money, / and that maybe helped people / overcome their objection to renting out / their own home to a stranger. // Same thing with Uber. // Uber came out, / incredible company, / incredible business model, great execution, / too. // But the timing / was so perfect / for their need to get drivers into the system. // Drivers were looking for extra money; // it was very, / very important. // Some of our early successes, / Citysearch, / came out when people needed web pages. // GoTo.com, / which we announced actually at TED in 1998, / was when companies were looking for cost-effective ways to get traffic. // We thought the idea was so great, / but actually, / the timing / was probably maybe more important. // And then some of our failures. // We started a company called Z.com, / it was an online entertainment company. // We were so excited about it / – we raised enough money, / we had a great business model, / we even signed incredibly great Hollywood talent / to join the company. // But broadband penetration was too low / in 1999, 2000. // It was too hard to watch video content online, / you had to put codecs in your browser / and do all this stuff, / and the company eventually went out of business in 2003. // Just two years later, / when the codec problem was solved by Adobe Flash / and when broadband penetration crossed 50 percent in America, / YouTube was perfectly timed. // Great idea, / but unbelievable timing. // In fact, / YouTube didn't even have a business model when it first started. // It wasn't even certain that that / would work out. // But that was beautifully, //beautifully timed. // So / what I would say, / in summary, / is / execution / definitely matters a lot. // The idea matters a lot. // But timing / might matter even more. //