Every entrepreneur has heard the advice about timing. Launch too early, and you’re a cautionary tale about being ahead of your time. Launch too late, and you’re just another me-too competitor fighting for scraps. But here’s what most people miss: timing isn’t about luck or gut instinct. It’s about reading the rate of change in society and positioning yourself right at the inflection point.
Think about it like surfing. A great surfer doesn’t just paddle out randomly hoping to catch a wave. They study the ocean, watch the patterns, and position themselves exactly where the energy is building. They can feel when the water starts to swell beneath them, and they know that’s the moment to start paddling. That’s not mysticism—it’s pattern recognition. And the same principle applies to business.
The rate of change in society is never constant. Sometimes culture moves slowly, grinding forward like a glacier. Other times, it accelerates rapidly, creating whitewater conditions where everything seems to shift at once. The businesses that succeed are the ones that correctly gauge not just where society is, but how fast it’s moving and in what direction.Take the rise of plant-based meat alternatives. For decades, vegetarian products existed in the margins, barely noticed by mainstream consumers. The cultural conditions were changing, but slowly. Environmental awareness was growing. Health consciousness was rising. Factory farming was increasingly scrutinized. But the rate of change was incremental, almost imperceptible year to year. Companies that launched plant-based products in the 1990s or early 2000s found themselves pushing against enormous resistance, trying to shift consumer behavior before society was ready.
Then something shifted around 2015. The rate of change accelerated. Environmental concerns moved from fringe to mainstream. Documentaries about food systems went viral. Instagram made food choices visible and social. Suddenly, the cultural conditions that had been slowly building reached a critical velocity. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods didn’t just have good products—they timed their major market push exactly when society’s rate of change hit a crescendo. They caught the wave right as it was forming.This isn’t about predicting the future in some grand, cosmic sense. It’s about developing sensitivity to acceleration. You can see the same product or service idea fail in one decade and succeed wildly in another, and the difference isn’t the idea itself—it’s that society’s readiness for that idea changes at different rates depending on countless underlying factors.
Consider how quickly society adopted smartphones versus how slowly it adopted smart home technology. Both seemed like inevitable futures in the mid-2000s, but one saw explosive, exponential adoption while the other has crept forward at a frustratingly gradual pace. The rate of change was different because the underlying conditions were different. Smartphones solved immediate, obvious problems and fit seamlessly into existing behaviors. Smart homes required infrastructure changes, new habits, and solving for privacy concerns that were intensifying rather than dissipating.
Learning to read these rates of change means paying attention to second-order effects and acceleration patterns, not just trends themselves. Everyone can see that remote work is growing. The question is: is it growing linearly, where you can predict steady adoption over the next decade? Or is it growing exponentially, where this year’s numbers will be dwarfed by next year’s? The business you build for linear growth looks completely different from the one you build for exponential change.You need to develop an intuition for what I think of as “social velocity.” When you look at any cultural shift—attitudes toward privacy, expectations around convenience, tolerance for complexity, trust in institutions—you should be asking not just what the current state is, but how fast it’s changing and whether that rate itself is accelerating or decelerating.
The tricky part is that most people confuse noise with signal. Social media makes everything feel like it’s changing rapidly and dramatically, but much of that is just surface churn. Real societal change has momentum behind it. It shows up in multiple independent indicators. It persists across demographic groups, even if at different rates. It has economic forces pushing it, not just cultural ones.
When you can correctly gauge the rate of change, you gain a massive strategic advantage. You know whether to move aggressively or wait patiently. You know whether you’re building for a market that will materialize in two years or twenty. You know whether you need to educate consumers or whether you should assume they’re already primed and ready.
The founders who get this wrong often had the right insight about the direction of change but catastrophically misjudged its velocity. They built infrastructure for a future that was coming, just not nearly as fast as they thought. They ran out of runway while waiting for society to catch up to their vision. Or conversely, they moved too slowly, treating an exponential shift as a linear one, and by the time they brought their product to market, the opportunity had already been captured by faster competitors.This is why some of the best entrepreneurs seem to have almost supernatural timing. They’re not psychic—they’re just better at reading the rate of change. They’ve developed a sensitivity to social acceleration that most people lack. They can feel when the glacier is beginning to crack, when the incremental is about to become exponential, when the conditions are aligning for rapid transformation.
And here’s the thing: this skill is learnable. It requires immersing yourself in weak signals, studying adjacent industries, understanding the underlying infrastructure that enables change, and most importantly, distinguishing between what people say they want and what they’re actually ready to adopt. It means looking for acceleration in data, not just magnitude. It means understanding that the rate at which something doubles matters more than its current size.The businesses that endure aren’t necessarily the ones with the best products or the most visionary founders. They’re the ones that launched with exquisite timing, catching society exactly as it was ready to move. That’s not luck. That’s having figured out the rate of change and positioning yourself right where the energy is building, paddle in hand, ready to ride.
