Laffont: Initial TAM size is irrelevant compared to market expansion potential
Thomas Laffont · Thomas Laffont, Coatue - Anthropic, Citrini Paper, AI Volatility & Next Mag 7 · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Mar 6, 2026 · at 24:06
Thomas Laffont, Co-Founder of Coatue Management, explains Coatue's investment framework for evaluating market sizes at the Upfront Summit.
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“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, Whatever number you want to give me for a TAM, a 100,000,000,007 trillion, you know, doesn't matter to me. But what I do think is, is that TAM going to grow between now and let's say the next five or 10 years. So pick whatever baseline you want. Is the TAM going to be two or three X larger in over that timeframe? So that's number one. A canonical example, right, is kind of the taxi TAM. It didn't really matter what the taxi TAM was, right? What mattered was it actually ended up growing five or 10 X because Uber created less friction and kind of grew the entire market. So I care a lot about TAM growth over time. That's point number one. And then I care a lot about additional TAMs.”
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