It's not obvious, except in hindsight, which startups are venture-scale. How big is the audience going to be for a new product? How much can you charge? Who knows? Some products start out in a small niche, get fanatical users, and then become mainstream.
eBay, pinterest and etsy are big today, but who could have predicted that? Does pinterest solve a Large, Urgent, and Valuable problem? I don't think it does.
Pinterest is basically another photo sharing app. Exactly the kind of thing that this author argues isn't venture scale, and yet it was valued at $50bn last year. Anything that has a few hundred million users is worth a lot.
It's trivial to tell whether a startup is venture-scale in hindsight, and impossible to predict in advance. A startup is venture-scale if the founders have growth as their #1 priority. Otherwise, not so much.
eBay, pinterest and etsy are big today, but who could have predicted that? Does pinterest solve a Large, Urgent, and Valuable problem? I don't think it does.
Pinterest is basically another photo sharing app. Exactly the kind of thing that this author argues isn't venture scale, and yet it was valued at $50bn last year. Anything that has a few hundred million users is worth a lot.
It's trivial to tell whether a startup is venture-scale in hindsight, and impossible to predict in advance. A startup is venture-scale if the founders have growth as their #1 priority. Otherwise, not so much.