The founder and VC Marc Andreesen once observed that “entrepreneurs are congenitally wired to be too early, and being too early is a bigger problem for entrepreneurs than not being correct.”

Indeed, if you look at a slew of new industries, the current 800-pound gorilla in the space wasn’t the first-mover. Facebook was predated by Friendster and Myspace, Google by Yahoo, Lycos, and Alta Vista.

At the same time, an ‘overnight success’ usually takes about ten years of hard work. So when a startup appears at just the right time, it’s often no longer really a startup, already several years into it’s path of consistent, quiet growth. In other words, though you don’t need to be the first to win an emerging industry, you do probably need to be relatively early, substantively innovative, and excellent at execution. You need to get started on a new idea before it’s widely recognized as the inevitable future, and then you need to fight to entrench your company in the order of things.

So I didn’t panic eighteen months back, when another company raised tens of millions of dollars behind an idea similar to Composite; they’re delivered as a B2B HR service, rather than a direct consumer business, and we’re intending to entirely bootstrap rather than raise external dollars anyway. And I kept my cool twelve months ago, when a major fitness magazine penned an article on emerging fitness trends, which nailed (admittedly individually, rather than as cohesive whole) at least 2/3 of the ideas that underlie Composite.

But in the last few months, I’ve continued to see more and more indications that we’re not the only ones starting to toe our way around some new, big ideas in the fitness, health, and behavioral medicine space. The time, clearly, is now. Composite team, let’s get to work.