It's About Timing And Taste

Founders love playbooks. We want to believe success can be industrialised: build this feature, hire these roles, follow these steps — and you’ll win.

But occasionally, someone who actually built a generational company tells you the truth. In a great piece reflecting on GitHub’s rise, co-founder Scott Chacon distilled their advantage into two lines:

“GitHub started at the right time. GitHub had good taste”

That’s an explanation that’s both insightful and intellectually unsatisfying. Insightful because it distills the complexity of company building into a pity statement. Unsatisfying because timing and taste seem impossible to control.

How do you know the moment is right? How do you cultivate taste?

If those are the core drivers of success, where does that leave the founder trying to do everything “right”?

Timing Isn’t Luck — It’s Proximity

From a distance, “good timing” looks like luck. Up close, it looks like being embedded in a shift that others haven’t yet seen, let alone named.

You catch a wave not by predicting the ocean, but by reading the ripples before anyone else sees the swell.

Founders with good timing tend to:

• live in fast-changing domains
• feel the friction that later becomes a market
• move when the signals are still faint

A founder’s edge often comes from noticing what’s going to be inevitable — and acting before others realises.

Taste Is Better Judgement, Not Better Aesthetics

Taste isn’t about decoration — it’s about discernment. It’s a worldview that shapes every decision.

To have taste is to:

• Know which details truly matter
• Reject unnecessary complexity
• Make something feel right before anyone asks for it

The fastest way to build taste is to make things, share them, and raise your bar each time.

Taste compounds. Every iteration refines your judgement and sharpens your instinct for what comes next.

The Paradox: You Can’t Control the Most Important Things

Execution feels controllable. Timing and taste don’t.

Yet, consistently, companies with okay execution but great timing win. Those with great taste delight. And the rare few with both become inevitable.

Founders quietly learn that their most consequential decisions come from intuition, not spreadsheets. Timing and taste are slippery because they work beneath conscious planning — sensed more than calculated, shaped by proximity and perspective rather than process.

How Founders Actually Influence Them

You can shape your exposure to both. Earn timing by working in a space where tectonic plates are shifting, getting close to edge users with unsolved pain, and building before permission arrives.

Develop taste by becoming the user, surrounding yourself with high-taste peers, and holding the product to a standard others think is unreasonable. These aren’t hacks — they’re environments. You grow into them.

The Founder’s Job, Simplified

Put yourself where the future is forming. Build with taste when nobody is watching. Keep iterating until the timing clicks.

When it does, everyone else will call you “lucky.” But you’ll know better.