Why Now

What changed recently that makes this idea possible or newly needed.

Also known as: why now, timing, why now slide

“Why now?” is the question behind every pitch: what changed — technology, regulation, behavior, cost — that makes this idea work today when it would have failed three years ago? Good answers name a specific shift; bad answers describe a timeless problem (“everyone hates expense reports” — true in 1998 too, so why did nobody win?).

strong:  "New e-invoicing regulation forces digitization + LLM document parsing just got good enough"
weak:    "The market is huge and underserved" (timeless, explains nothing about timing)

Common real shifts: enabling technology crossing a threshold, new regulation creating or destroying categories, behavior changes (remote work, mobile money), cost collapses (LLM inference, sequencing, launch costs), and platforms opening distribution. Investors pattern-match on timing because being early and being wrong look identical until the shift lands.

The classic mistakes:

No shift named. A pitch without a why-now is implicitly claiming the idea was always obvious and everyone missed it. Arrogant and usually wrong — find the shift or admit the timing risk.
A shift that already happened years ago. “Mobile/cloud/AI changed everything” in a market that already absorbed it. The window matters: too early dies waiting, too late faces entrenched winners.
Confusing a trend with a shift. Trends (“AI is growing”) are weather; shifts (“this regulation takes effect January 1st”) are events. Fundable timing is event-shaped.
One shift depended upon entirely. If the whole company needs a single platform, law or model capability to arrive on schedule, that dependency is the riskiest assumption — test or hedge it first.

Write the slide: one line naming the shift, one line on why past attempts died without it, one line on the window. If you cannot fill it, the idea may be timeless — beautiful, and unfundable until something moves.