Up & Right

I just did something quite ordinary…checked some football scores on my ESPN app on my iPhone. Just a normal day here in 2011. Then briefly my mind flashed back to 2006 and ESPN MVP, which if you don’t remember was ESPN’s failed MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator - business that leases network access from someone such as Sprint who owns it). 

Laptop Magazine called ESPN MVP on the Sanyo MVP “a touchdown, a game-winning shot, and any other victory-celebrating sports cliche you can conjure…its innovative interface will surely be imitated by many handset makers.” 

Surely.

Think of how far the world has come in just five years? Want to develop an app in 2006? Phones were so heterogenous and data plans were so rare, ESPN had to launch their own cell phone network to get their app to actually work reliably on customers mobile phones. Talk about boiling the ocean! Wow. Not only were phones totally non-standard and nearly impossible to develop across (unless you were JAMDAT whose entire business was basically SKU’ing up a game for every phone) but also the carriers restricted innovation via their “walled gardens” which Verizon treated like an iron curtain. 

But no, today, I didn’t need to ditch AT&T just to see some scores. I simply tapped on the shiny ESPN logo on my iPhone.

What’s the lesson in all this and how does this tie back to startups and VC? Timing and platforms. It’s important to get them right and understand the climate and ecosystem that need to exist for your startup to thrive. MVNOs such as ESPN MVP spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do what today would be trivial. There is such thing as being too far ahead of the curve. 

Be conscientious. Are you developing a platform or developing on a platform and is that platform ready for primetime? Don’t get caught in the middle.