CHAPTER 14
YOUR OPENING GAMBIT
The time to eat appetizers is when they are being passed around.
—Eugene Kleiner1
What do good jokes, startups, and acquisitions have in common? Impeccable timing! Before Facebook, there was SixDegrees, Tribe, Affinity Engines, Friendster, Myspace, and a myriad of other social networking platforms trying to build the social graph and connect friends online. Similarly, before LinkedIn there was Spoke and ZeroDegrees that tried to do the same for professional networks. Yet none of those early entrants managed to succeed on a massive scale. Their failure was not due to lack of foresight or poor execution. They just didn’t get the timing right, and in that, they were in very good company. Bill Gross, the founder of ...
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