Total Addressable Market

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

“Maybe it's not micro, it's more like mini or medium market, like a couple billion TAM large, which is to say you can build a very lucrative business, even capturing like a double digit percent chunk of this, like you can make a few hundred million per year, an…”

“I'm a big believer that if the market you are in, if the market has a big opportunity, you as a company will get a lot more chances to make it work, right? If you're in a market with a small dam you do, do one thing wrong and you're out of business more than l…”

“I have a personal view that I've developed, which is actually the size of the TAM is irrelevant. So I never listened to whenever an entrepreneur will pitch me a TAM, I really don't think about the TAM. I think about two things. I think about number one, Whatev…”

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

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

“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.”

“Overpayment only works when the TAM is huge.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I think the TAM for doing things right is bigger than the TAM for things that do things wrong. The only problem is that the moment you prove that that's true, everyone is gonna follow in your footsteps and become your competitors in this new post-Prisoner's Di…”

“You can't constrain by always sorting, descending by Tam.”

“A funded startup is going to have some inherent pressures that you don't necessarily have if you're bootstrapping. A big one being like, they have to make sure they're targeting a big enough TAM. You know, the total addressable market is large enough to kind o…”

“It also really changes how you think about the total addressable markets for some of these things, because if you're charging per seat, you're really limited by the number of people working at the company. If you're charging per conversation or per some aspect…”

“The sort of top down approach I think is, is riddled with errors in, in thought. Whereas if you kind of look at what's my selling price, how does it compare? So you kind of want to see that average selling price and then compare it to companies that are target…”

“I think in these times where you don't know the TAM and things are moving quickly, you definitely want to pick the best team. I don't think you should overthink the space, but like asking questions about like TAM or valuation or value makes a lot less sense be…”

“You need to start small because India rewards depth more than width. So you need to go deep. Solve for the pain points. The way we have built is to listen deeply to our customers and continue to evolve as their needs evolve. And through this journey, the produ…”

“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…”

“I don't believe in overthinking TAM. I think TAMs are like you build those for IR and you build those to raise money. You may want to create this wonderful dramatic TAM to go raise, you know, a couple of million bucks, but that's not what should be processing …”

“We are a firm believer, nonetheless, that a core part of being successful as a startup is, yes, you have a wide TAM, but you execute specific to a vertical, specific to a workflow.”

“Even though people are going to say other things matter more, like your pricing strategy, what's your go-to-market? What's your total addressable market? All those things sound fancy, and they don't matter. Get a few people to buy things from you fast. Get a f…”

“I think this is a 30 to fifty billion dollar TAM, total addressable market business. I think that, what's that, the IDE market, development environment, I think that's like a thirteen billion dollar one.”

“So one of them is often when you bring the marginal cost of something down, like with compute, you know, we did it for computation and for the internet, we did it with distribution. It increases the TAM a whole bunch. So, so for one, you almost always see this…”

“Infra creates TAM.”

“You can basically turn anything into a hundred million dollar business these days. Like the technology is really big. The world's really big, you know, as long as we don't figure out tariffs on technology. And so I think you actually don't even have to think t…”

“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…”

“I think there will be a sort of like unified platform that comes together that takes all of these sort of disparate piecemeal processes and basically combines them. So you can effectively say like, this is my TAM. I want meetings. And the output can be, these …”

“I think like a 50% gross. That has enough expansion to still be positive is kind of fake. You know what I mean? Like low logo retention, but like an expansion dynamic, like that, that, that doesn't really, I mean, I think MailChimp probably had that, but also …”

“The TAM is north of twenty billion dollars when we expand across three other verticals.”

“To me, I worry about, like, the, like the total addressable market, like the TAM. I think for me, it's a little too narrow, so I'm gonna pass.”

“So the total addressable addressable market, our addressable market is six, is thirty six billion dollars currently right now.”

“And so I think that that the TAM is going to be a hundred X. It's going to be every endpoint. The revenue is going to come from the apps side of it, and then there'll be a developer side of it. It'll just be a different pricing model for different sets of scen…”

“I would say almost prefer more like less math on it, more like less conditional positive outcomes. So, you know, one if-then statement versus many layered if-then statements. So I want one good thing to happen for the time to play out versus Five good things t…”

“Tam is not an ingredient for startup success. That's like a feature of the world. And so I think Focusing too much on the big problems and why this is a great problem to solve or whatever is a bit of a distraction from the real core point of here's a buyer. Th…”

“The single greatest mistake that founders make is TAM. They overestimate how big their opportunity is, and then they go raise super diluted venture capital money”

“You, like, you need to have a huge TAM, right? Total, like, you know, huge total addressable market that you can go after. That's the only way that consumer works because you have to make content that is going to be, like, broad enough that, like, a large enou…”

“Hard to build a really scaled business on a two billion dollar TAM.”

“Their target is not their market, and they get so caught up in trying to, when they're raising funds, talk about big TAMs, that they feel like they need to chase their entire TAM at once, rather than do marketing one-on-one, find your target market. And levera…”

“Your TAM is really constrained by the number of contacts, not the number of accounts. If you have a million accounts and one persona to reach out to, you have a million contacts. But if you can reach out to four, five, six, seven different people within an acc…”

“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.”

“What I've come to realize is I'm not interested in the total available market. I'm interested in the total future market. I want the product to define future market and be the category king of that future 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…”

“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.”

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

“And if you're, look, if you're bootstrapping SaaS and you want to get to a 1,000,003 1,000,005 million in ARR, you just don't need that many, you don't need that many companies. You're not building a venture scale business where it's like, well, my total addre…”

“TAM is kind of a misleading metric for marketplaces, because in all the biggest marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb, it looked like there was no TAM.”

“And a lot of VCs, you not included, but a lot of investors are like, but the TAM is too small. You're just focused on blogs or you're just focused on selling surfboards. Like, you know, it's not that tends to not actually be an effective long-term strategy. Ca…”

“TAM, total addressable market, is top down. It's coming from the MBA at Harvard saying, well, we could capture 30, 50, 80% of an entire market and then it's worth decabillion dollars. That's top down. When you are bootstrapping or mostly bootstrapping, I think…”

“I think that matters more than what your ARR is in the aggregate, or if you're a first-timer, a second-timer, a third-time founder, can you articulate the business you have And the industry you're building it for can you articulate a plan where you can be 50%,…”

“So focus on the markets that are early. I would say below ten billion is where I would really go, but if you can get it lower to a billion dollar total addressable market that you think is going to grow in the future, that's where you should go.”

“Like, you know, sometimes we sort of talk to our team about it, so we didn't do any TAM analysis. Like, how do you do TAM? There's no product in the market. Nobody actually is even solving this problem.”

“The earlier you go, the less it matters. And some of the most phenomenally good startups, if you were really pedantic about it, the TAM would be like tiny. Like the TAM of Uber would be like nothing, right? Like how the TAM of Airbnb would have been nothing.”

“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.”

“And the thing you got to prioritize about all else, it's kind of like value is bigger than market size, like prioritize delivering value. And that tends to take care of itself”

“The vast majority of billion dollar companies start off with niche markets, which is why for me as a VC, like Tim is just not all that important. Honestly, like I do look at back in the envelope really quickly. Could this in theory become big? And that's like,…”

“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.”

“This product has no upper bound, honestly. Because it's upper bounded by the number of people on the planet multiplied by each individual's curiosity and Curiosity has no upper bound either, right? So therefore by mathematically the Tam of perplexity has no up…”

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