Cumulative Advantage - Why You Should Start Now

One specific, undeniable mechanism for this is as regards SEO. The longer your domain is up, the longer links to you are up, the more links you have accumulated, the higher your ability to rank for terms of interest is. If you get to the first page of the SERP for something, you will tend to accumulate more links over time. Winners win, and winners take most.

Even if your company gets shot out from under you, you very well might have a personal blog, portfolio site, or something which folks routinely cited when saying that you were doing X, Y, or Z. You can take that with you, as capital for your next adventure.

By the way, if you get a company shot out from under you, please don't just slap up a We're Closed sign and let the domain lapse. That makes the SEO in me want to wince. Your Internet reputation is worth money, and (modulo whatever your agreement is with investors as regards IP) you probably still own it even if the business is not functioning as a going concern. Point some links to your personal domain and, when time comes, your new project. ("Thanks for your support of MyTwitLy.er.ous, we failed to find a business model blah blah blah, the CEO Bob went on to create SellsSoftwareForMoney.com and our co-founder is currently making (linky)education done right(/linky) in Seattle.")

For anyone currently involved in a startup this is trite, but sadly for many this is probably the single most important thing they need to internalize.

It reminds me of this guy I met on a flight to London a couple months ago. We had been chatting, and when I mentioned I was working for a startup his ears perked up a bit. He told me he had this idea for an app that he thought would be "huge". I asked what it was, but he didn't want to share the idea, just that it would target various mobile devices like iphones and ipads. I asked if he was working on it, "no, waiting for the right time to find a developer and get started". Meanwhile he's forty-something in a cush corporate job.

I suggested politely there's no better time to start than now. But inside I'm laughing. As if the idea is so amazing that he must guard it preciously from casual conversation, and that some guy already working for a startup has time to steal it! I wanted to say, you should come to silicon valley and be bombarded daily with ideas ten times better than yours that are still nearly impossible to execute. Ah, but you can't trade war stories with someone content to dreamer.

It's interesting to see how long ago the Matthew Effect (aka Cumulative Advantage) has been noticed.

This sociological phenomenon was named after a verse in the bible: For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

-Matthew 25:29, New Revised Standard Version.

Nassim Taleb also talks about cumulative advantage in his book Black Swan.