total addressable market

“TAM, in a way, already is defined as a market that's already existing, right? Because you're trying to figure out Which part of an existing market you can address with this company or the solution?”

“So this is contrarian, but I actually don't think that TAM is very important. The greatest consumer companies of our time have been created in very small markets.”

“If there's not a billion dollar TAM for this thing, it's not possibly the basis for a product that could support an independent publicly traded company.”

“We do very little of that. We spend a huge amount of time on the team and what they could do early on.”

“I actually never try to ask Tam up front. I never try to think about the existing market, because when you're a seed investor in the early stage, at least I feel like I'm in a business of exceptions.”

“If you think about the tan of the 12 markets we're in between grocery and restaurant food, it's 1.2 trillion pounds or 1.8 trillion dollars, right?”

“When you just see the bottoms up velocity of a business and every market growing and every cohort growing. The chances that right around the corner, you're going to hit some TAM wall is very unlikely, and you actually need to listen to the bottoms up data some…”

“It's a hundred percent about the founders. Not 99, it's a hundred percent. Forget about markets, forget about TAM, forget about even other co-investors. Myopically focus on your relationship with founders in choosing people who are going to build the next gene…”

“The reality is all of the biggest markets were never as big as they were until the defining companies made them that way.”

“What I have learned is that, you know, hypergrowth in the early days can decay for a variety of reasons, right? But it does prove you have a large TAM. It always proves to me that if you grow quickly in the early days, you have a large TAM, even if it looks sm…”

“It doesn't matter how fast the company is growing, how great the technology is, how big the total addressable market. If you don't feel like you're learning from the people that you're surrounded with, then you're in the wrong spot.”

“You go look at the demand that's inbound, and then you look at the latent demand that doesn't exist. That's an immediate way to increase the TAM that you're pursuing without hiring any more people.”

“It's not the TAM you start with. It's a TAM you exit with.”

“In the early days I was looking at markets and total addressable market time and technology and differentiators. And I simply realized that all of that is bullshit. You know, it's not important at all.”

“One of our tenants is definitely that market size TAM is noise.”

“Brute TAM analysis is maybe overdone. I'd focus more on the teams. You know, great teams always find their way to kind of slingshot from a market, from the small market to the big market, or it takes the small market to become a big, to get into a big market.”

“If you're going to sell, A product that only goes to one vertical, you're seriously limiting the size that the company can be, right? Just think about the TAM. Like, if I'm gonna sell into healthcare, that's all I can sell into. That's, you better crush health…”

“TAM is a trap. Like, go back and look at the S-ones of some of the biggest public companies today. Their market caps are bigger than what they thought the TAM would be.”

“I think the venture lesson, be visionary, but relentlessly honest about TAM. Because it's a TAM story at the end of the day. If you have a number one or number two player in the space and you see a TAM explosion happening, that's where you get a big lift, righ…”

“So, I don't know if I get to that hundred million plus, hundred billion plus in revenue, because I just run the math and I can't find the TAM, but I could be wrong in underestimating it. My guess is no, and it slows more than you think, but it's not a crazy ca…”

“If you get an M&A offer as a founder or an investor, and the founders make the decisions, the VCs don't make the decisions. If your TAM isn't really accelerating, take it.”

“If you're going to sell A product that only goes to one vertical, you're seriously limiting the size that the company can be, right? Just think about the TAM.”

“Entry price counts when TAM is unclear. Winning is the only thing that counts when TAM is huge.”

“Overpayment only works when the TAM is huge.”

“And at my entire life in B to B as a founder or investor, every time we try to be too negative on TAM, it bites us.”

“Our whole job in technology is to change TAM, actually.”

“I just think we have to give up on TAM. We just have to let the revenue show us the path to TAM.”

“We've just overestimated TAM and we've overestimated the ability for companies to launch multiple products and expand into new TAMs. We're usually not getting things wrong on the basis of metrics or the team being good or it wasn't growing fast enough.”

“I think that the TAM of frontier models is frankly, overweighted right now.”