See the original linkedin post.

This is an extension of my #FMB “Founders are Made, not Born: How Founders Become Learning Animals” series. Originals based on research at Stanford: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII. Extensions: Parts 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

One of the first questions I always ask a founder is: Why now?

Investors are obsessed with investments having a “why now” because timing is the difference between success and failure. Many great ideas were too early. 

Getting a startup off the ground is hard. You don’t want to be fighting against a current with a tiny team with few resources. Tailwinds, or currents, that propel your team and give you extra velocity, are critical liftoff ingredients. 

TL;DR – This article covers 9 types of shifts that can constitute a “why now” and 4 properties of strong tailwinds:

The 9 Shifts
1. Regulatory
2. Technology
3. Geography
4. Politics
5. Consumer Taste / Cultural Movement
6. Macro Economic / Capital markets
7. Cyclical
8. Talent
9. Biz Model

The 4 Properties

A few properties of particularly strong shifts include:

1. Clarity  
2. Permanence  
3. Magnitude Matters
4. Speed

What Constitutes a Real Shift

Many people equate “why now” with technological innovation. That’s certainly one source, but there are actually 9 common types of shifts that can underpin a compelling story. Founders who understand this taxonomy and back it with timely data tend to unlock faster conviction from experienced investors.

Regulatory Change

Shifts in regulation often create entire categories of new companies. When the European Union implemented the PSD2 directive, it forced banks to open up their APIs, catalyzing a wave of open banking startups like TrueLayer and Tink. Similarly, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act channeled hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy and climate infrastructure. This opened new markets for carbon tracking, renewable tech, and battery storage startups. The Dodd-Frank Act in 2010’s focus on open banking regulation led to many valuable companies (Robinhood, Coinbase, Plaid) being formed.

Great regulatory “why nows” often come from subtle but systemic shifts that change who can operate, how, and at what cost.

Technological Maturity

A new technology rarely sparks a wave on its own. The tipping point tends to arrive when that technology becomes fast enough, cheap enough, or simple enough to change user behavior. Large language models, for example, had existed for years. But the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022—and more importantly, the accessible API that followed—opened the floodgates for startups to build AI agents, copilots, and new interfaces. Today’s frontier companies are built on infrastructure that simply did not exist in production-ready form even 18 months ago.

Other examples include the falling cost of GPUs, which makes training models at the edge viable, and the mainstream availability of vector databases, which enable semantic search and memory for autonomous systems.

Geographic Opportunity

Sometimes the “why now” comes from region-specific structures. NuBank grew into one of the world’s largest digital banks because Brazil’s traditional banking system was inaccessible and slow to innovate, and Brazil had one of the highest banking ROEs and interest rates in the world. As connectivity and smartphone penetration expanded, so did the addressable market. Similarly, startups like Flutterwave and Chipper Cash scaled rapidly in African markets where infrastructure gaps and shifting regulations created wide-open fintech opportunities.

Location also matters in reverse. As remote work became the norm during the pandemic, the rise of platforms like Deel and Andela reflected a supply-demand mismatch in global talent. These companies didn’t invent remote work, but they scaled by riding the moment around geographic dispersion when it became newly feasible and urgent.

Political Climate

Politics can directly create market opportunities, especially in sectors like defense, energy, and cybersecurity. The U.S.-China trade war dramatically reshaped supply chains and increased the appeal of domestic manufacturing, reshoring, and alternative chip supply. According to a Brookings analysis, tariffs and national security concerns pushed U.S. companies to rethink dependency on foreign-made goods.

In the cannabis industry, shifting laws at the state level—even without federal alignment—enabled platforms like Dutchie to serve the growing compliance needs of dispensaries. Policy friction often leads to fragmented infrastructure, which is exactly where startups thrive.

We are all aware of the US<>China relations putting pressure on TikTok, which creates a strong why now for a new social video company.

Cultural/Consumer Behavior

Founders often overlook how fast consumer sentiment can change. Cultural shifts are harder to quantify, but they are incredibly potent when spotted early. The mainstreaming of wellness culture among Gen Z created opportunities for brands like Oura and Eight Sleep, which combine health tracking with lifestyle branding. Similarly, the viral mechanics of TikTok enabled new startups to acquire users at near-zero customer acquisition cost. As covered by the Wall Street Journal, many digitally native brands now build their entire growth strategy around algorithmic discovery.

GenZ has many new trends – they’re not drinking as much, they’re lonelier – this is creating shifts in how they engage with friends and media, creating a why now for the rise of ai-companions like CharacterAI.

These moments reflect not just new platforms, but changing values, expectations, and attention patterns.

Macro and Capital Markets

Macroeconomic conditions influence what kinds of companies can get built—and funded. When interest rates are low, capital flows toward riskier bets, including speculative consumer fintech or web3 projects. When rates rise, as they did beginning in 2022, both investors and operators shift toward sustainable models with clear unit economics.

Lending companies became less attractive in 2022 as rates rose and investors needed to adjust their approach. Capital markets volatility is also a strong why now for stablecoins as currency fluctuations destroy monetary value.

Cyclical Trends

Not all change is linear. Markets go through cycles, and sometimes the best “why now” is simply that we’ve come full circle. The resurgence of interest in physical retail is one example. After years of direct-to-consumer hype, many startups are now building omnichannel models that integrate physical space with digital data and logistics.

Similarly, the crypto ecosystem is cyclical. Peaks of interest lead to infrastructure upgrades. Every cycle tends to produce new developer tools, financial primitives, and security platforms. Founders who can survive the trough and build into the next wave tend to dominate.

Talent Liquidity

Talent moves faster than capital. When a new talent hub is discovered – such as Stripe, Palantir, or OpenAI, they create a new bed of highly trained operators who have seen greatness. These people often bring inside knowledge, networks, or product instincts that let them start with an edge.

Finding new pockets of talent can be the reason for a why now. Most recently, Stanford researchers studying under specific academic luminaries like Fei-Fei Li have become a new source of talent that has strong why now alignment as new technologies require the expertise developed in labs like hers.

The rise of new communities like Neo, HF0, On Deck and Reforge also increased the speed at which early teams can form and raise pre-seed capital. The best founding teams often come together during moments when talent availability spikes and playbooks become widely shared.

Business Model Innovation

Finally, sometimes the shift is not external at all—it’s how you charge. Business model innovation is one of the most underrated forms of “why now.” Affirm and Klarna did not invent consumer credit, but by rebranding store credit and creating instant BNPL and underwriting models with better UX online, it unlocked an entirely new user base.

Similarly, Snowflake used usage-based billing to reprice cloud data in ways that aligned better with customer incentives.

In today’s AI ecosystem, new billing models like per-action pricing, credits, and revenue-sharing APIs are reshaping how software gets bought and sold. Usage-based billing is a new pricing model enabling applications built on LLMs to manage growing LLM costs.

These changes don’t require a new technology; they require a new way to align value capture.

4 Characteristic of a “Why Now” 

There are 4 characteristics I look for in a compelling “why now.” 

1. First, it needs to be simple. If it takes 10 minutes to explain the connection between a shift and your product, it is probably not a strong enough catalyst.
2. Second, it should have some permanence. Not every trend sticks. During COVID, many companies leaned into the narrative that everything would permanently move online. But in reality, behavior tends to default back to whatever is faster, cheaper, or easier. Great “why nows” reflect changes that are structural, not seasonal.
3. Third, the shift must be large enough to affect entire markets. A niche movement might be interesting, but to build a venture-scale company, it needs to scale well beyond its origin community.
4. Fourth, the speed of change matters. Some shifts hit like a wave. Others grow slowly until a threshold is crossed and everything changes at once. Streaming, for example, didn’t reach mass adoption until subscription prices dropped below the cost of a postage stamp.

If you want to communicate a compelling “why now,” focus on this phrase: “It was impossible to build this company X months ago. Now it’s not. Here’s why.”

Use Specific Language

You will hear investors use terms like shift, current, inflection point, catalyst, or tailwind. These words describe the same idea in different metaphors. You don’t need to use all of them. Just choose the one that best matches your story—and explain it precisely.

Saying “there’s a tailwind in AI” is not enough. Saying “transformer models can now run on mobile devices, enabling offline real-time inference for diagnostics” is a lot more effective.

Final Thought

Too many founders obsess over features, traction, or TAM. Those are inputs. Timing is the multiplier.

A great product built too early is a case study. A strong product built at the perfect moment can become an industry standard. 

If you are building during a moment of structural change, make that the first thing we hear. Name the shift. Prove it exists. Show why the world just opened a door that won’t close again.

“Why now” isn’t just a slide in your deck.

It is the foundation of your advantage.