I think the fallacy isn't in the importance of timing, but the idea that there is one definite point in time in which a technology revolution happens, and if you happen to miss it, wups, sucks to be you.
Most technology revolutions have an "epicycles upon epicycles" structure, where the revolutionary technology spawns many other revolutionary technologies, sometimes decades later. The microcomputer, for example, was a revolutionary technology in 1975, and within a year had spawned two of the current tech giants (Microsoft and Apple). But whither Visicalc (1979) or Adobe (1982) in that narrative? It took time for the public to adopt microcomputers and the development platforms to stabilize before you could really build on them and create successful applications.
And then the microcomputer itself spawned the WWW, which actually was developed on workstations (1989) before microcomputers were powerful enough to run it, but gained adoption (Netscape, 1995) when consumer OSes started shipping a TCP/IP stack. A whole slate of massive web companies were spawned in 1995 (Netscape, Amazon, EBay, Yahoo, Google) because they were in a place to catch the technology revolution - but Facebook didn't get started until 2004 and AirBnB didn't take off until 2009, again because it took time for social practices to catch up to the technology.
The lesson for entrepreneurs, perhaps, is to pay careful attention to the world as it exists when you're founding your company, and look at where the trends are going. There are certainly worse times than others to found a company, and they're often towards the end of a technology wave: 2001/2002 was absolutely brutal to Web 1.0 companies, and I can't think of a single mobile startup founded in 2013-2015 that succeeded. But Ethereum, Consensys, Gemini, Brave, and other blockchain startups founded 2014-2015 are doing great; you just had to catch the next technology wave instead of the previous one.
Most technology revolutions have an "epicycles upon epicycles" structure, where the revolutionary technology spawns many other revolutionary technologies, sometimes decades later. The microcomputer, for example, was a revolutionary technology in 1975, and within a year had spawned two of the current tech giants (Microsoft and Apple). But whither Visicalc (1979) or Adobe (1982) in that narrative? It took time for the public to adopt microcomputers and the development platforms to stabilize before you could really build on them and create successful applications.
And then the microcomputer itself spawned the WWW, which actually was developed on workstations (1989) before microcomputers were powerful enough to run it, but gained adoption (Netscape, 1995) when consumer OSes started shipping a TCP/IP stack. A whole slate of massive web companies were spawned in 1995 (Netscape, Amazon, EBay, Yahoo, Google) because they were in a place to catch the technology revolution - but Facebook didn't get started until 2004 and AirBnB didn't take off until 2009, again because it took time for social practices to catch up to the technology.
The lesson for entrepreneurs, perhaps, is to pay careful attention to the world as it exists when you're founding your company, and look at where the trends are going. There are certainly worse times than others to found a company, and they're often towards the end of a technology wave: 2001/2002 was absolutely brutal to Web 1.0 companies, and I can't think of a single mobile startup founded in 2013-2015 that succeeded. But Ethereum, Consensys, Gemini, Brave, and other blockchain startups founded 2014-2015 are doing great; you just had to catch the next technology wave instead of the previous one.