Conventional startup dogma states that a startup’s success is, fundamentally, a function of market timing. It’s normal to be washed over by the giddiness of a “good” idea; however, no matter how “good” your idea is, you’re still at the mercy of timing your venture right.

In 2022, I started working on Reshape with a good friend of mine. Our vision for Reshape was a data analytics environment where the only language you needed to know was English. We wanted all knowledge workers to be able to get insights from there data without being restricted by the data science skills required. After speaking to potential customers, we determined that there was a need for such a product, but we were constantly feeling bound by the limits of our domain knowledge and the current landscape of natural language processing technology. So we quit after a couple months :(.

A couple weeks ago, I came across Pretzel: an open source & AI-native replacement for Juypter Notebooks.

Sound familiar? Yea, sounds a lot like Reshape, right?

I still think Reshape was a great idea with tons of potential, but unfortunately the technology necessary wasn’t available at the scale we needed to successfully execute our vision. This is not to say you should wait until the conditions are right to launch or build a product because you can never know when its right time.

- rohan

PS: Just to be abundantly clear, I’m not arguing that the folks over at Pretzel somehow stole our idea, or undermine the work they’ve done. I’m using them to prove my point about the fundamental relationship between time and startup success. On a side note, I’m thrilled that they’re taking on this challenge and their demo is vastly more impressive than ours. I’m curious to see how far they can run with this and I’ll definitely be cheering them on along the way (the founders are both ex-Stripes 👀)