Market Size

“And people Are, at least in my experience collectively, at least investing against the fact that they believe the speed is there, which is different from the market size. People are conflating the two things right now, in my opinion.”

“I've never seen a market in the world where you have transparency and price discovery that is not 10 times its size.”

“Market size matters a lot more than people, than, at least as an entrepreneur, I gave importance to. You can change everything, but you cannot change market size really. Best entrepreneurs can create the market, but still market size has to be there. There has…”

“What people narrow down into a small market size, and they get saturated, They can never come out of it.”

“It could be that what everyone is pointing to is like a lack of a market is actually just a product and packaging problem.”

“I've already told you why I think people are more important than everything for one, and I think that some of the biggest mistakes I've made as an investor is when I've ignored traction because I've had reservations about the market. Traction is so hard to man…”

“We don't talk about or look at market size at all, unless it's sometimes there's a, you know, a confirmation that it's a small market.”

“There's an important principle here that you and I can apply to our own work. And the fact that the more work that you do for the customer, the easier you can make for the customer, the greater the market can be.”

“And what happens typically is that the overwhelming reason why a particular company does, you know, doesn't end up doing well is that some of your assumptions around the size of the market do not work out. I would say that just happens to be the overwhelming I…”

“There are this incredible, I mean, business is really hard, right? And there are just a multitude of things you have to pay attention for. I'm right because all those things fall into those three categories. So it's an exhaustive set, and it's just, it's, it s…”

“Look, I think this is the biggest mistake is basically try to estimate correctly what the market size is. You just need to know that if it works, it's going to be big enough.”

“I think the most important thing that people don't realize is that when we look at market size, we're looking at the market size with the existing product.”

“When somebody's pitching a market size on real estate, you talk about trillion dollar market size. That's a BS. One has to look at the profit pool.”

“I weight market third on the three that you asked me about because I just think it's the hardest one to assess and predict for myself, and I think when you look at the investments you just described and some of the very great ones, that was true for those inve…”

“I always advise people that don't worry about the market size. You know, I know every, every VC will say the other way around and they're right. They're not wrong. But I'm saying as an operator, when you're about to build a business, you should worry about how…”

“I think if you have a great team in a really, really bad market, there is a good chance that they will still turn it into like some decent level of success, or maybe they can pivot into a better market. So I think the team is the more important factor of the t…”

“It doesn't mean that we want or expect to have clarity on the market size by the time we invest. I think we've learned like many other investors that it's really, really hard to predict a market size”

“So you have to, I think, if you're going to be great at this, not try to be a coward and hang your hat on the market size. I think that's what cowards do.”

“We do talk about market size, but we surely don't think it's the most important thing at a Series A.”

“Where people succeeded or failed was about the size of the market that they were actually trying to get to. And second was the focus.”

“Markets are all pretty big now, and I don't really care about market size as much as if this business has a natural path or some, not even natural, but the founders and the team are thinking about how it expands over time and where they see it going. I feel li…”

“Sequoia was legendary in prioritizing market over team, right? And so Don Valentine has, if you go online and Google Don Valentine's talks, he talks a lot about how the key to success of a startup is to land yourself in a giant market. Like, Land yourself in a…”

“Honestly, the best investors will want to see a small market, because a small market at the beginning means you can identify who's in that market very cheaply, versus having to boil the ocean, saying, well, there's like, Two percent of all people in the world …”

“If you have no competition, that's a bad sign. You know, that's usually means you're in a small market.”

“The way we think of it is, is really about the neighborhood. And what I mean by that is, is there a special team with a tiny toehold that Of value to the user with immediate ROI that they can get wins with, that they can continue to raise capital on, and do th…”

“The lesson there is value is important, but market size, market leadership, and company traction are far more important and far harder to assess. Therefore, you've really got to weight your ability to assess them and your certainty and your conviction around t…”

“Just as I don't know how to do 10 things that the VP of engineering at a company does, I've now long since recognized that most entrepreneurs calculate Can't calculate the market size, and their estimates are invariably wrong.”

“You start off with a relatively small market because you need to be able to win in a market that you can dominate. And then what you find is that market expands as you see in more and more use cases for your product. And then you have the best of both worlds i…”

“If someone says to me, it's a thirty million dollar market right now, expanding at a hundred percent, I'm intrigued. If someone says to me, it's always going to be a thirty million dollar marketplace, I got to turn it down.”