Recency Illusion

You're seeing it when a team declares something an emerging trend immediately after encountering it for the first time. The excitement of discovery gets misattributed to the novelty of the phenomenon. Check the timeline: how long has this actually existed?

You're seeing it when a founder treats a competitor as a new entrant simply because they just learned about them. The competitor may have years of traction, customer relationships, and operational learning — all invisible until the moment of discovery.

Before pivoting toward a "new" trend, research its actual history. If the strategy or market has existed for years, you're not early — you're late to notice. That changes your competitive calculus entirely: you're entering an established space, not pioneering a new one.

Andreessen's famous 2011 essay "Why Software Is Eating the World" was widely received as a prediction about the future, but it was largely a description of something already well underway. Andreessen's insight wasn't that software disruption was coming — it was that most people hadn't noticed it yet. He understood the Recency Illusion from the other side: while incumbents treated software-driven disruption as a new phenomenon, Andreessen had been watching it unfold for over a decade. His venture strategy exploited the gap between when a trend actually begins and when the broader market finally notices. For founders, this demonstrates the power of distinguishing genuine emergence from collective late discovery — the best opportunities often live in the gap between reality and awareness.