For the past six months, there has been a lot of handwringing about the market downturn. Most everyone has been advising entrepreneurs to marshal their capital, cut costs, and extend their runway. In essence, play defense.

Many investors have been creating a whiplash effect with their portfolio companies. As one of my CEOs put to me, wryly — “In my January board meeting, I wasn’t hiring and scaling fast enough and told to ‘go, go’, go’. In my April board meeting, I was burning too fast and was told to ‘stop, stop, stop’.”

Her experience rhymes with many stories I’ve heard.

But recently, as the dust has settled a bit, I am seeing the best entrepreneurs realize that now is the time to play offense. The “play offense” playbook is well known to many, but hard to execute during a downturn. With the start of the football season around the corner (go Patriots!) and as I have been talking to my most talented entrepreneurs, I have been thinking more and more about what playing offense looks like in 2022–2023. Here’s the six-part playbook I’m hearing:

1) Talent acquisition. A few years ago, it was impossible to acquire talent. The best engineers, sales reps, and growth managers could name their price and had a dozen offers in front of them. Today, layoffs — particularly at growth stage companies — have led to a massive pullback in startup hiring. Thus, some of the most talented people in our ecosystem are suddenly up for grabs again. My best portfolio companies are judiciously adding remarkably talented people on the front lines, taking advantage of arguably the best talent market in a decade. I’m amazed at the quality of the hires that are happening for those who are seizing this moment to pursue outstanding talent.

2) Uplevel executive teams. It’s difficult to admit, but the executive team you were able to attract a year ago may be very different from the executive team you can attract today, particularly if you’ve grown in the last year and have a demonstrably bright future ahead. Like the talent point above, C-level executives at companies that were rocket ships at one point find themselves either laid off or disillusioned with their future prospects. That stretch VP of sales? Go get them. The COO who wouldn’t look twice at you a year ago, they’re begging to have the opportunity to re-engage. Rigorously evaluate the quality and capacity of your senior team and take advantage of the extraordinary executive talent looking for new homes and more promising pastures.

3) Process improvements. Let’s face it, the last few years have been frenetic. Velocity was at 11 for everyone. When you’re moving that quickly, inevitably there will be sloppiness in your execution. Sometimes it’s a gift to have the opportunity to slow down and fix your processes and make sure you’re doing things in a scalable, repeatable fashion. The Navy Seals have a saying, “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” The best entrepreneurs are taking this slower moment to re-examine their key business processes and make sure that they’re running them more effectively and efficiently. Train your interviewers (Who has time for that?! Now you do!) and develop a more careful rubric for developing job descriptions and scoring candidates (sidebar: here is a complete guide to interview training from my company BrightHire). Rethink your product development prioritization process. Make sure sales best practices are being disseminated systematically within the go-to-market organization. Fire unprofitable customers — unsustainable, unprofitable growth is no longer valued. Executing well on this component of the playbook can provide significant leverage in a few short years.

4) Invest in your Product. Speaking of the product development process, if sales are less frenetic and customer requirements (and complaints) less noisy, take the time to invest in your product roadmap. Engineers and product managers love it when they’re “left alone”. Take the time to do deeper customer discovery and requirements gathering. Customers might be more open to participating in beta tests, new feature rollouts, focus groups, and customer advisory councils. This moment in time, where there are fewer distractions, is one where product teams can really make headway on their ambitious roadmaps and take the time to articulate — and take steps towards realizing — their long-term product vision.

5) Execute small, targeted M&A. Every asset was overpriced a year ago — houses, public stocks, startups. With the market correction, suddenly assets are more interesting to acquire. Many, many startups are flailing. Cash reserves are dwindling and they are desperate to find a safe landing. Thus, the companies that can afford to play offense have the opportunity to scoop up amazing teams, customer bases, and platforms. One of my portfolio companies has executed three acquisitions in the last six months at prices that are 2–3x lower than what the selling entrepreneurs were asking for a year ago. Developing skill as an effective acquirer is an important muscle for scaling companies and now is a great time to test out that skill.

6) Financing. There is a ton of money out there looking for great companies to invest in. Funds have raised an enormous amount of capital in the last two years. Never before in the history of entrepreneurship has there been this extraordinary amount of committed capital designated to invest in startups. If you have built a good business with promising prospects, you can stand out from the crowd far more easily today than ever before. Yes, your valuation may be 20–40% lower than you had hoped, but you can still raise plenty of money to buttress your balance sheet and execute more vigorously on steps 1–5 of the “play offense” playbook outlined above.

In talking to my best founders over the last few weeks, each of these elements of the “play offense” playbook is now well underway. The companies that can afford to execute on them, and do it well, will be lightyears ahead of their competitors in the next few years.

We are pleased to announce that Flybridge has raised a pair of new, oversubscribed funds with aggregate commitments of $150 million to continue our mission of backing ambitious founders at the pre-seed and seed stage. With this latest fundraise, Flybridge crosses $1 billion in assets under management, reflecting the outstanding success of our founders and portfolio companies during our 20-year history.

The new capital includes a $110 million Seed Fund (our sixth), which will invest in very early-stage startups leveraging the power of community as a source of competitive advantage, as well as an Opportunities Fund (our first), which will invest exclusively in our fast-growing portfolio companies as part of an outside-led growth financing. The Seed Fund has already closed eight new investments in AI/robotics, cybersecurity, low code/no code, creator economy, web3/crypto/NFTs, and SaaS. Our first Opportunities Fund investment was our recently announced investment in the Series B at Chief, a company we first invested in when we co-led the $3 million seed round in 2018.

The new funds complement our four Network Funds: (1) XFactor Ventures (focused on female founders), (2) The Community Fund (focused on under-estimated founders), (3) The Graduate Syndicate (focused on founders who recently graduated from Harvard), and (4) a new Network Fund called LTV Operators, comprised of C-level executives at unicorn startups.

A few years ago, we reinvented the firm and took an innovative approach to how we invest. Starting with The Graduate Syndicate in 2016, we created each of these Network Funds to empower operators and founders around the world to invest in talented founders from their own communities. While our core investment team is comprised of four partners and one senior associate, our fund is the anchor investor for each of these Network Funds that are made up of over 40 investment team members. We power the back office and handle fundraising while supporting these funds with mentorship, education, connections, and community. This strategy has both deepened our insights and expertise and expanded the Flybridge community in a massive way, allowing us to see 5x more investment opportunities than other seed funds of a similar size.

Ultimately, what really inspires our team every day is working with our community of over 400 founders across over 300 companies. They represent a very special, diverse group of extraordinary people who have invited us to join them in their disruptive missions to create significant companies from scratch. Some of these founders have become leaders in their industry — such as Bowery, Chief, FalconX, and MongoDB — and have done so with a unique blend of grit and passion.

While we acknowledge the range of crises rocking our world — from Ukraine to COVID to climate change to a racial reckoning — we could not be more bullish about the investment opportunities in front of us. At a time when we are collectively becoming increasingly digital, globally connected, awash in data, and decentralized, the number of innovations and disruptive opportunities is simply dizzying. Advancements in the science of entrepreneurship and company-building, as well as the accompanying tools, have dramatically compressed timelines and improved a founder’s odds of success. New companies can be created remotely and rapidly like never before. New products can be efficiently built upon powerful platforms that we barely dreamed of ten years ago. What will the next ten years bring?

We couldn’t be more excited to find out.

Thank you to our investors for their continued trust and a special thank you to our past, current, and future founders. We are honored to serve and support you.

As many of you know, each spring I provide a comprehensive list of exciting, fast-growing, rapidly hiring startups that are promising places to start or continue a career in Startupland.

This year has been another boom year for tech startups, to say the least. As a result, it’s been the hardest list ever in my eight years of doing this. Graduating students and mid-career professionals have an abundance of opportunities to launch their careers. Leveraging insider knowledge and input from VC and entrepreneur friends regarding who has real momentum, I mix subjective and objective criteria in assembling the list. The objective criteria include:

• Growth / momentum: typically growing users and/or revenue > 100% year over year
• Fundraising: typically has raised > $40 million in the most recent round, which closed in the last 18 months (note: independent, private companies only! 10% of last year’s list went public and 3% were acquired)
• Scale: typically > 100 employees
• Hiring: typically growing headcount > 50%/year, including a number of entry-level positions that would be a fit for recent college or business school graduates
• Young: founded in 2011 or later

With the help of numerous VC friends in startup hubs throughout Europe, India, Israel, and LatAm, I try to cover international startups each year. Pitchbook is less reliable outside the US and so I am particularly grateful to the dozens of folks who shared their local market insight. I left out China this year. That was a tough decision but because of the government’s anti-tech policies this year, it was hard for me to ascertain winners and losers with confidence.

This year, I include nearly 500 companies: 350 US companies and 140 non-US. As usual, the list is organized by location although I decided to be a bit more expansive in including startups from all over the US instead of just the tech hubs given remote and hybrid work. That said, even in this era, I advise my students to select and commit to a particular geography. Investing and contributing to a community in the long term is valuable for both your career and your life.

For the first time, we included a “diversity and inclusion” tab to the data set to guide prospective job seekers on whether this area is one of strength or weakness for the particular company. We used data from Glassdoor to populate this field (an explanation of the data source can be found here) and then translated that rating into three bands: weak, fair, and strong.

Before listing the companies, I suggest checking out two of my posts where I give more detailed advice on how to select the right company and position yourself to secure a job — a playbook I have seen executed successfully now across my decades as a VC and entrepreneurship professor at HBS working with thousands of young professionals:

• Getting your First Startup Job
• Are You Suited for a Startup?

As usual, I am sure I have made many mistakes and omissions and so thank you in advance for your feedback. Continued feedback (and lobbying!) definitely make this list better over time. A very special thank you to the talented Priya Bhasin of MIT Sloan whose precision and tenacity made this list what it is.

Without further ado: here is the Airtable link for all 500 companies:

Disclosure: Among the listed companies, the following are Flybridge portfolio companies —BitSight, bloXroute, Bowery, Chief, EmCasa, FalconX, MadeiraMadeira, Splice, Tomorrow.io, and Zubale.

It has been a hard week to focus on startupland.

My usual daily obsession with new innovations, new entrepreneurs, and new fundings has been replaced with daily reports of bombs, convoys, and sanctions as Ukraine struggles for its survival. The blog post I had been working on regarding illiquidity in venture capital and the recent tech market correction now seems woefully tone-deaf.

My inbox and news feeds are full of heroic acts by Ukrainian friends, colleagues, and former students. One of my VC friends posted last night that he and his wife had flown from Boston to the Romanian border and handed out $7,000 in cash to 100 Ukrainian women.

This week’s NY Times The Daily podcast — “In Ukraine, the Men Who Must Stay and Fight” — described the buses being stopped at the Ukrainian border as all men ages 18–60 are ordered to remain in the country to take up arms to fight. As one Ukrainian young man put it, “Last week, I was contemplating what new game to buy for my PlayStation and today I am contemplating taking up arms to kill Russian soldiers and defend my country.”

A Ukrainian former HBS student who is a managing director of a private equity firm in Kyiv with over a billion under management, happily married with two young children, wrote: “All we have now fits in a few suitcases…this is not an abstract [classroom] discussion — it’s Munich all over again. We’re on the brink of WW III if the world doesn’t act. Please speak up. Please don’t remain silent.”

The echoes of 2022 and 1939 ring particularly true to my ears. My father was born and raised in pre-War Poland in an obscure city that is now in Western Ukraine called Lviv. I watch CNN every night, bewildered, as Andersen Cooper reports from Lviv. When the war broke out in September 1939, my father (then 14 years old — now turning 97 in a few weeks) and his sister and parents drove to the Polish-Romanian border, which today is near the very same Ukrainian-Romanian border town referenced above. Like my former student, they had crammed their most precious possessions into the few suitcases that could fit with them all in the car.

My father describes the September 1939 border crossing in his recently published memoir, “The scene at the bridge was unbelievable. The entire Polish government was evacuating. There was a long cavalcade of cars carrying various dignitaries from Warsaw. Some of the limousines flew foreign flags and carried officials from foreign allegations and their families…Poland and its most respected institutions were dissolving before our very eyes.”

My grandparents had doubted their decision to flee their friends, family, and home until they saw these dignitaries departing. They abandoned their suitcases, stuffed whatever they could fit into knapsacks, and walked across the border with the help of a smuggler and a healthy bribe — my grandfather handed over his precious silver pocket watch to the border guard. My father describes that his grandfather had the foresight to liquidate much of his net worth into a handful of bars of gold, one kilogram each, which he carried in his knapsack. As I read reports of modern-day Ukrainians carrying their cryptocurrencies across the border and the millions of dollars of donations flowing through the blockchain into the hands of Ukrainian families and relief organizations, I get the chills.

My father’s survival created a ripple effect, allowing him to eventually find his way to the United States, meet and marry my mother, and have me and my two sisters. I would not be here today if not for many random acts of fate during that harrowing time. Similarly, every single Ukrainian refugee has a story and a legacy. As the Talmud says, “Save one life, save the entire world.”

I pray for our leaders and I pray for the Ukrainian people and all those affected by this war.

How to help Ukraine (Washington Post).

This week, Valentina Ratner (formerly Toll Villagra), co-founder and CEO of AllSpice, announced the company’s $3.2M seed financing. AllSpice is essentially building “Github for hardware” — a collaboration hub inspired by software principles, powered by Git, and designed to accelerate hardware development. Apart from being a talented team with a unique solution targeting a significant market opportunity, AllSpice is consistent with our belief that community-driven companies that harness the power of a passionate ecosystem of members to drive adoption and growth will outperform. And they are executing on a go-to-market strategy that we love — emphasizing developer-driven adoption rather than top-down sales — a playbook successfully implemented at other Flybridge portfolio companies like MongoDB. We are #proundinvestors and look forward to working with Valentina, her co-founder Kyle Dumont (both of whom were in my Launching Tech Ventures class a few years ago), and the entire AllSpice team as they seek to realize their vision.

But this funding announcement isn’t our run of the mill portfolio company funding announcement. That is because AllSpice and Valentina are also the 100th company founded by a woman to join the Flybridge Community in the last five years. These 100 companies have been founded or co-founded by over 150 incredibly talented women.

Several years ago, we started asking ourselves some hard questions as we saw, again and again, the alarming statistics that ~ 85% of venture capital was going to male-only founding teams. Why was it that our firm and our community of founders were not much different than the statistics? Bluntly put, why were our potential investment opportunities so skewed towards companies founded by men?

We concluded that we were missing a massive opportunity to invest behind transformative companies founded by ambitious women. By missing out on these potential opportunities, we were missing out on generating incremental positive returns as we believe deeply that diverse founding teams will be more successful as they will be able to better access and retain talent, design better products and solutions to meet unmet needs in the market, and, ultimately, make better decisions, leading to stronger companies and better returns.

This conclusion led to the launch of XFactor Ventures in 2017, a pre-seed and seed-stage fund focused on women-founded companies pursuing billion-dollar opportunities cofounded by my talented partner Chip Hazard. To diversify our deal flow, we needed to diversify our network — you can’t invest in what you don’t see. XFactor allowed us to do this in spades. Each of the over twenty female founders who are now members of the investment team is a magnet for amazing companies, often with female founders. We also expanded our full-time investment team, adding Anna Palmer, who co-founded XFactor with us, and Julia Maltby. These changes have led to a dramatic difference in the gender balance of our deal flow and, slowly, our portfolio. Our portfolio company, Chief, is one example of a company that we believe is poised to generate outsized returns for our investors thanks to our commitment to this strategy.

Chip has taken his decades of experience in venture capital and poured it into this mission, dedicating an enormous amount of time to creating a platform that would not only invest in more female founders but also train a new generation of female venture capitalists. Above is a photo from one of the first offsites of the original XFactor team. The three women in the back row are now general partners at VC funds — Erica Brescia (Redpoint), Aubrie Pagano (Alpaca), and our very own Anna Palmer.

We still have much work to do, but today is a day to celebrate a small victory along the journey: 100 new companies founded by women, the launch of an amazingly promising company in AllSpice, and a ripple effect that we look forward to seeing in the market for many years to come.

And a special thank you and hat tip to my partners, Chip and Anna, for leading the way.

Over the holidays, there was a bit of a firestorm on Twitter over comments made by venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale of 8VC regarding VCs and racism. The original tweets and resulting dialog inspired me to write this post in an attempt to address the question that was posed: how do we explain the fact that only 1% of VC capital goes to Black founders? “Are VCs racist?” Or perhaps a better-framed question, “Why is there such a persistent race gap in the VC industry?” As we look ahead to 2022, I believe this issue is one of the most important ones that our industry needs to grapple with.

For context, I have been examining the systemic biases in the tech industry for a number of years as a result of three hats that I wear. First, through my day job as a practicing venture capitalist — I cofounded a NY and Boston-based early-stage VC fund, Flybridge Capital roughly 20 years ago. Second, through my civic work at Hack.Diversity — a workforce development nonprofit I co-founded six years ago that provides a pathway for young Black and Latinx professionals into the tech ecosystem. And finally, through my part-time work as a member of the faculty at Harvard Business School where I recently created a course with my colleagues Professors Henry McGee and Archie Jones called Scaling Minority Businesses, a field course where we study the impact that systemic racism, lack of access to capital, and lack of access to customers has on minority-owned businesses.

I am not a scholar in the field of systemic racism and bias. Instead, I am an intellectually curious practitioner and a white male of privilege trying to learn about these issues and through that learning, apply them to change a pernicious injustice in our startup ecosystem. It’s a journey and I know I have more work to do, as do the institutions that I’m a part of.

Beyond correcting these injustices, I have also been studying this area in an attempt to be a better investor. Over the years as I’ve read and discussed these issues, my thinking has changed. Once you lift the veil on all of the unconscious biases and racist systems that require dismantling, it’s hard to see the world the same way. But I am also seeing some amazing progress and emerging leaders who are successfully challenging the status quo and changing this system one brick at a time.

Joe Lonsdale’s Tweets

So with that background, let’s dive in. First, let me share the tweets that Lonsdale posted. The first one was in response to a tweet from a venture capitalist and entrepreneur named Prince Ramses (@imthedronelord):

Lonsdale later deleted that tweet but followed it up with another two that I’ll include here in response to a thoughtful reply from Steve Ekechuku, a NY-based lawyer:

There were a number of other tweets in the subsequent back and forth, but I’ll stop here for now as I think these three capture the essence of the comments that sparked the controversy.

I should state upfront that I don’t know Lonsdale. Although we are in the same small industry, we have never met. Reading his tweets really upset me. And I can’t even imagine how upsetting they were for Black VCs and entrepreneurs. That said, I want to try to turn the incident into a “teachable moment” and broaden the conversation to examine the three biggest contributors to the race gap in VC funding.

1. Systemic Biases (Largely Unconscious) and Discrimination

Each year, Flybridge chooses a non-business book to send to our founders as a year-end gift. This year, we chose an influential book in social psychology called Blindspots: Hidden Biases of Good People. The authors, Professors Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, build on their pioneering work in creating the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to demonstrate that human beings have strong, often unconscious and instinctive, biases. In research study after study, the authors describe these remarkable “mind bugs” that show how our unconscious preferences manifest themselves in strange, surprising and sometimes disturbing ways.

The implications of this social psychology insight are powerful in the context of racial discrimination. Although the authors indicate that various studies show that we have seen explicit, overt biases decrease in America in recent decades (I should note that the book was published in 2013 — years prior to the Trump era and the recent rise in hate crimes), strong implicit biases remain. Specifically, the IAT has “revealed that approximately 75% of Americans display implicit (automatic) preference for white relative to Black.”

Towards the end of the book, the authors conclude that these hidden biases “plausibly contribute more to discrimination in America than does the overt prejudice of an ever-decreasing minority of Americans.” In their appendix, they frame that “Black Americans experience disadvantages — meaning inferior outcomes — on almost every economically significant dimension. This includes earnings, education, housing, employment, status in the criminal justice system, and health.” And they acknowledge that there are two theories of Black disadvantage. Again, quoting from the appendix: “One set of theories credits Black Americans themselves with full responsibility for the disadvantages they experience. The other set…place the entire responsibility elsewhere.” The authors conclude that “institutional discrimination as a cause of Black disadvantage is undeniable historical fact.”

I believe this book contains important implications for our startup ecosystem. The authors’ insight that “human judgment and behavior is produced with little conscious thought” is illuminating in the context of investment and hiring decisions. In Startupland, these decisions are made with a modest amount of data and in the context of a large number of complex variables. Thus, instinct is a powerful force in decision making and instinct is rife with biases, both conscious and unconscious. Pattern recognition can be used as a weapon in startup pitches by founders. I once had a young entrepreneur kick off our pitch meeting by sharing that he was a Harvard dropout. I later found out that he actually never attended Harvard College and never dropped out. Instead, he enrolled in a few Harvard extension school courses, which are open to the public, and then ceased enrolling in the extension school. Obviously, he was trying to anchor me and my unconscious mind on famous Harvard dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, using the power of association to create a favorable impression of his founder journey. This example is somewhat harmless (I didn’t fall for it), but it’s emblematic of how unconscious, positive associations towards some founders and negative towards others can affect investment decision-making and lead to less capital going towards Black founders.

Another terrific book by NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt demonstrates that these biases are inherent in humans, very natural, and very hard to deconstruct. The Righteous Mind is a book that Haidt, another social psychologist, wrote to explain tribalism in politics but I read it through the lens of a venture capitalist and what it said about our ecosystem. Like Greenwald and Banaji, Haidt reviews the extensive research and philosophical underpinnings that show that humans are fundamentally intuitive decision-makers. His work is more focused on moral judgments and the insight that moral judgments are unconscious and that these unconscious cognitive processes are evolutionary in nature, allowing us to form social groups and tribes. This rapid intuitive judgment is a powerful force that is then followed by rationalization. As Haidt points out, “the intuition launched the reasoning, but the intuition did not depend on the reasoning.”

If these two books are right, we should see evidence of these unconscious biases in investor decisions. Not surprisingly, a few recent studies have shown exactly that.

2. Intuitive, Biased Investment Decisions: Gender and Race

In 2017, four researchers (including my colleague Professor Laura Huang) published a ground-breaking article in Harvard Business Review that observed Q&A interactions between 140 prominent VCs and 189 entrepreneurs that took place at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. When they analyzed the Q&A sessions, they saw that VCs asked different types of questions to the male founders than they did to the female founders. VCs “tended to ask men questions about the potential for gains and women about the potential for losses.” Surprisingly, the researchers found evidence of this bias with both male and female VCs! Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs that are asked promotion-based questions raise more money than those asked prevention questions. In other words, male and female VCs had similar intuitive biases about the male and female entrepreneurs they met with, resulting in more capital going to male entrepreneurs.

In 2019, Stanford Professor Jennifer Eberhardt and colleagues published another study demonstrating the unconscious biases of asset allocators. By creating fictitious VC fund manager profiles and asking prospective limited partners (LPs) to evaluate those profiles, the researchers showed that LPs were unable to properly assess Black-led VC managers or distinguish between the stronger and weaker, Black-led teams. Professor Eberhardt concludes, “One explanation of this finding could be that investors rarely see Black-led teams. They simply don’t know how to evaluate them.” (I should note that Professor Eberhardt also recently wrote a book on hidden biases: “Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudices That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do”. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on the list!).

These studies are manifestations of substantive racial biases in our ecosystem — perhaps some of these lead to overt racism but, in my opinion, and based on the research, even good people who are not racist also demonstrate unconscious and instinctual biases.

Black VCs and entrepreneurs don’t need academic studies to tell them what they experience day to day. Venture capitalist and entrepreneur James Norman wrote a compelling HBR article called, A VC’s Guide to Investing in Black Founders in which he discusses differences between Black and white founders. These differences can lead to different profiles, paths, cultures, and styles of communication. As Norman points out, “Unfortunately, you can count on one hand the number of investors who have first-hand experience with our journey, and there are only a handful more investors that look like us.” (disclosure: Norman launched a new VC fund called Black Ops VC where I’m a personal investor).

3. Historical, Systemic Racism and the Wealth Gap

Continuing Norman’s theme, we now turn to the second powerful force that leads to the “1% problem” — historical, systemic racism and the wealth gap. When researchers and historians examine the economic implications of systemic racial biases as manifested in policies, the scorecard is pretty damning. Brookings scholar Andre Perry wrote a powerful book reviewing this history called Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities. In the book, Perry builds on previous work by some of his Brookings colleagues in measuring the Black-white wealth gap — where the average Black household has $17,600 in median net financial worth as compared to $171,000 for the average white household — and outlines the underlying factors that have led to this disparity. Perry reviews policy decisions around redlining and housing, urban development, disparities in schools, health care, and incarceration policies to demonstrate the uneven playing field that Black households have faced in recent decades.

For more on housing policy, in particular, I also highly recommend Berkeley Professor Richard Rothstein’s seminal book on redlining and housing — a critical source of household wealth for Black and white households in recent decades — called Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. These two books as well as many others (e.g., Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Ownership) provide a glaring picture of policies that have consistently held back economic development for Black businesses and families, thereby reducing the opportunity for generational wealth creation. Linking the impact of these policies on the 1% problem is clear, for example:

• Black families have dramatically less wealth so young Black professionals from those families take on less risk early in their career when they are still establishing themselves and paying down their loans.
• Friends and family money to support very early company formation is more plentiful in white families than Black families.
• Professional networks with access to early-stage capital are more available to white professional networks than Black professional networks.
• Black professionals don’t have easily accessible friends and family ties to the industry because the industry is small and closed.

With so few allocators of capital being Black (one analysis by my colleague Professor Josh Lerner showed that only 1.3% of assets under management are controlled by substantially and majority diverse-owned firms, which include women and minorities), with the important role of pattern recognition and intuition in decision making, and with the historical systemic policies and practices that have led to dramatically lower levels of wealth in the Black community, it is no surprise that we are where we are with only 1% of funding going to Black entrepreneurs.

The arguments above suggest that it is not because VCs or even LPs are overtly racist (although I acknowledge that some are and many Black founders and VCs have shared some pretty bad stories of encounters with them). Like many other humans, they’re highly biased decision-makers operating in the context of a historically racist system. Unlike many other humans, those biased decisions have massive economic consequences.

What Are The Solutions?

Hedge fund manager Howard Marks famously observed that the best investments come from nailing a theme or bet that is non-consensus. That’s why Flybridge has intentionally pursued a series of strategies in recent years to increase our investment in more female founders (see XFactor Ventures) and founders of color (see The Community Fund, where we are seeking to add a few new partners): we believe we are going to find amazing investment opportunities that others are missing. And it’s why I’ve been personally investing in more Black VC managers, such as Black Ops VC, Visible Hands, Collab Capital, Stellation Capital, and others — these managers and others like them are seeing attractive investment opportunities that I am not seeing and don’t have access to. There is much more we can and will do in the coming years. And I hope that other VCs and LPs follow the opportunity and direct more institutional and personal capital to underrepresented VC managers.

Fortunately, there are promising efforts underway to get more capital in the hands of emerging Black managers as well as Black founders — initiatives that, critically, are breaking open the small coterie of insiders that control the industry. Many are being driven by LPs (who are allocating capital to Black founders and asking hard questions of non-diverse managers), by entrepreneurial VCs (who are creating both new funds and changing the culture and processes of big firms from within), and by founders. Successful founders have tremendous power in this industry. I hope to see more founders creating wildly successful companies led by diverse teams. But I also hope to see all founders demand that their cap tables and board rooms contain diverse leaders.

These efforts and the rise of strong, talented emerging Black managers (e.g., Precursor Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Harlem Capital, Backstage Capital, RareBreed VC, and many more as well as the ones mentioned above) give me hope that we are seeing a sea change in our industry. It will take years to play out — largely because of the unconscious biases, historical racism, and friction points mentioned above — but I’m hopeful that we won’t be talking about the 1% problem in ten years. And I sure hope that we won’t see other powerful and prominent VCs making hurtful proclamations that inappropriately attack or blame Black people and culture for the funding gap. The story of the coming years is more likely to be the rise of many wildly successful entrepreneurs and investors from backgrounds, cultures, and countries that we have not seen before.

We all have a role to play in helping facilitate that outcome. My hope is that in so doing, we will finally achieve the dream of leveraging the power of all the talented humans on this planet eager and ready to innovate.

Many thanks to the many friends and colleagues who provided me with valuable insight and input for this post, including each of my Flybridge colleagues (Anna, Chip, Jesse, and Julia), Daniel Acheampong, Kwesi Acquay, Jewel Burks Solomon, James Norman, Jody Rose, Ed Zimmerman, and many of my brilliant HBS students.

I am a huge Thomas Friedman fan. As someone who has cousins from both Lebanon and Israel (thanks to the messiness of WW II and its impact on our family history), I simply adored From Beirut to Jerusalem. And he has been all over the impact of climate change and the world’s obligation to shift to renewable energy (see Hot, Flat, and Crowded). So when he published The World Is Flat in 2005, I lapped up his utopian vision of an integrated, globalized world. 

But in retrospect, Friedman’s book was quite a bit ahead of his time. When reviewing the actual data, his description of a flatter world where ideas and capital freely flow, knowing no boundaries, simply did not pan out. Or at least, until COVID. After decades of stubborn roundness, the world has dramatically shifted – particularly in Startupland – to finally becoming remarkably flat.

A Flat World: Delayed Reaction

Friedman’s predictions, and those of other globalization enthusiasts, faced strong skepticism after the book’s publication. As economist Pankaj Ghemawat wrote in Foreign Policy in 2009 in an article titled “Why the World Isn’t Flat”: “The most astonishing aspect of various writings on globalization is the extent of exaggeration involved. In short, the levels of internationalization in the world today are roughly an order of magnitude lower than those implied by globalization proponents.” Examining a range of data sets — from global migration to foreign direct investment (FDI) — Ghemawat showed the extent to which globalization had, in reality, stalled.

In the decade since Ghemawat wrote this criticism, many of these important measures have only gotten worse. FDI, for example, has actually gone down rather than up, as the chart below shows. As can be seen in the sharp dip in 2020, COVID may have accelerated digitization around the world, but it also slowed foreign investment and globalization.

In a recent article in The Economist covering the auto industry and its shift to electrification, I was struck by the fact that GM — still a powerful symbol of American industrial power — still derives 80% of its revenue from the domestic market, recently divesting its struggling operations in India and Russia. Hardly the outcome Friedman acolytes would have predicted 16 years after his declaration that a flat world would result in a “fundamental shift or inflection point” in how leading businesses would sit astride the globe.

Meanwhile, in Startupland: Flat, Flat, Flat

The odd thing, though, is that those of us in the venture capital (VC) industry are experiencing something on the ground completely different from what these figures and commentators suggest is happening in the mainstream economy. In fact, as VCs head into 2022 and continue to digest the implications of COVID on our operating model, I feel as if Friedman’s prediction of a flat world has finally arrived in full force in Startupland.

With the pandemic, geography suddenly no longer matters quite so much to either entrepreneurs or early-stage investors. Entrepreneurs can now easily access the investors who are the best fit for their venture in terms of specific expertise and value-add – and similarly, investors can now easily access entrepreneurs all around the world. Like many of our peers in the industry, the Flybridge partnership has become comfortable investing over Zoom in the last eighteen months.

Prior to making an initial investment decision, we often meet an entrepreneur only once in person to get to know them as a person and leader, and occasionally not at all. As a result, our geographic spread has changed dramatically. Previously, 40% of our portfolio came from each of NYC and Boston, where we have our two offices, while 20% of our companies were based outside these two cities. In contrast, in the last year, 75% of our new investments came from a wide variety of locations outside of these two centers, including the Bay Area, Denver, Los Angeles, London, Tel Aviv, Austin, Washington DC, Miami, as well as Cairo and Sao Paolo. Every single one of our colleagues in the VC industry is facing a similar, global expansion of geography — or dramatic “flattening”.

The vast majority of global venture capital is managed by US firms — according to the NVCA 2021 Yearbook, 67% of the $112B in global capital raised in 2020 was achieved by US firms (up from roughly 50% in 2015 and 2016). Thus, this greater comfort with geographic expansion by US firms is an important lever to drive more global startups to achieve success, which in turn will kick off a virtuous cycle and cause more global startups to attract more capital.

Global Unicorns: 2026

Although there has been a strong rise of global “unicorns” (i.e., a private company valued at over $1 billion), I would argue that this trend is only just beginning due to the shifting, COVID-induced investment patterns of VC firms. Because of the 5-10 year lag between when a company is first created and when it grows and matures to become a unicorn, we can expect to see a dramatic change in the number of global unicorns in, say, 2026. Comparing what the world looked like five years ago, in 2016, to today’s unicorn profile in 2021 might give us a few clues to help predict the 2026 outlook.

In December 2016, CB Insights indicated there were 183 unicorns (hat tip to the Wayback machine for helping me source this data), of which 55% were based in the US, 21% were based in China, and 24% were based in the rest of the world (ROW).

Today (in what is nearly December 2021), there are 848 unicorns (note: the CB Insights website indicates 887 but when one downloads their actual data set, they only have 848 categorized so there may be a data lag in the more complete categorization). Of these 848, 50% are based in the US, 19% in China, and 31% were based in ROW. Thus, a substantial, five percentage point increase in the share of “rest of the world’, despite the globalization trends remaining relatively tepid over the last ten years and despite the torrid pace of investing from the US-centric venture capital industry.

If we extrapolate five years from now into 2026 and assume that these trends continue, then we can posit that ROW will continue to gain in share and comprise of, say, 38% of the global unicorns. This figure is probably a very conservative one given the trends I highlighted earlier regarding the acceleration of US VC capital flowing outside the US. The chart below shows how this might play out in the coming years.

On a percentage basis, this figure sounds relatively modest — another five percentage points in five years. But on an absolute number basis, the implications are profound. If we assume that the rate of growth of unicorns continues at a similar pace in the next five years as it has over the last five years, we will see a total of nearly 4,000 unicorns in December 2026. If the ROW share of unicorns does indeed increase to 38%, then the total number of unicorns from the rest of the world will be an astonishing 1,493 — an increase of 1,233. If the share actually accelerates a bit, then the total number of new international unicorns outside of China will equal that of the US — despite the fact that US VCs manage two-thirds of the industry’s capital.

Unicorns or Bunnies?

The bottom line? In the coming years, US VCs — even small, niche ones like my firm, Flybridge — are learning to invest globally. As we make our first few investments in any individual country or region, our networks expand, our contextual awareness improves, and our comfort level for making the next new investment increases. As a result, international entrepreneurs are going to be able to attract US VCs in the coming years more easily than ever before.

And one final prediction — for those pessimists who think the unicorn herd is going to thin out in the coming years, think again. The unicorns are going to multiply so quickly in the next five years that we may start to think of them more like bunnies.

Many people forget that former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s now-famous reference to “irrational exuberance” was in 1996. At the time, he asked the provocative question: “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?”

Investors are asking themselves this poignant question over and over again in recent months. When my Flybridge partners and I were preparing for this week’s annual investor meeting, we stepped back to reflect on how to balance the obvious exuberance we are seeing in the market with our robust optimism that there are sound, fundamental reasons behind this exuberance. We came up with the phrase, Rational Exuberance, as the best way to capture the moment that we find ourselves in. Yes, valuations have soared and we VCs are all paying more as we construct our portfolios. Yet, like other top firms in the industry, we are realizing that for our best companies, the scale of market opportunities has proven to be much larger than previously anticipated. Our entry price may be 30–50% higher, but we are investing in companies that are exhibiting 3–5x higher exit potential. That’s a trade we will take over and over again. Let me unpack why we — and many others — have come to this conclusion.

Rational Exuberance?

Valuations have soared to a record high in the last few years, particularly in the public markets. For example, the NASDAQ has increased 105% in the nineteen months since the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020. And from the public markets, those valuations have cascaded down to the later stage private market, where capital is pouring in at record levels.

As a result, the rise in startup valuations — particularly later stage startups — is dramatic. The chart below, drawn from Pitchbook’s latest data set, shows the sharp increase in the last two years. Later stage financing valuations have grown so sharply and on such a large scale that the magnitude of the change in valuations at Flybridge’s stage — the seed stage, labeled here the Angel stage by Pitchbook — is imperceptible.

But everyone in our small corner of the early-stage market has also seen substantial valuation increases. When we analyzed our seed-stage deals across three recent cohorts — 2017–2018, 2018–2019, and 2020–2021 — we saw that despite being located outside the ridiculously competitive Silicon Valley (our offices are in NYC and Boston), our post-money entry valuations have grown 56% and 33%, respectively (see chart below).

Interestingly, each of these cohorts raised more capital. The average seed round size for our portfolio companies in 2016–2017 was $1.7M while it grew to $2.6M in our 2018–2019 cohort and then $3.3M in our 2020–2021 cohort. Entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the higher prices to raise more capital in the seed round and thus make more progress before raising their series As — leading to dramatically larger series As at dramatically higher valuations. Crunchbase recently reported that the average Series A round has increased from $6M to $18M.

Come on Get Higher!

Why are valuations rising across the board across all segments?

The obvious answers are Economics 101 (thanks, Alan) and well covered in the daily newspapers: capital is chasing yield in a low interest rate environment, more capital drives up prices (simple supply and demand) and at the same time, when later stage and public investors do their future value math for growth companies, low-interest rates result in higher future value calculations — thereby valuing growth even more.

The less obvious answers are what we are seeing on the ground as we work with our companies day-to-day. First, technology innovation is affecting and disrupting the entire $23 trillion US GDP. We used to focus on a little small corner of the market called the IT industry. Today, every company is a technology company, and every industry — from healthcare to financial services to retail to real estate — is being disrupted.

Second, with a nod to Thomas Friedman, the world has gotten flatter. Global smartphones have now reached over 80% of the world’s population up from 25% just six years ago, increasing the potential market for all of our companies. And, finally, as we study technology adoption patterns, we are seeing a fundamental shift to more rapid, earlier adoption of new products and services.

I have written in more detail about this phenomenon that we are seeing of faster technology adoption, framing the situation in the context of Geoffrey Moore’s canonical book from 30 years ago, Crossing the Chasm. In short, every business on the planet is realizing that they need to be an early adopter and embrace new technologies or they will be disrupted — think Blockbuster and Barnes & Noble. And every consumer has been trained to rapidly embrace new apps that make their lives easier and richer. As a result, the pace of technology adoption has quickened and the potential market size that startups can address in their early years — even if their product isn’t perfect and their organization is still nascent — has dramatically expanded. That’s why a young infrastructure company like our portfolio company MongoDB can count over half of the Fortune 500 as their customers at the time of their IPO a number of years ago.

All of this is leading to our conclusion that market sizes are proving far, far larger than we had ever imagined — surpassing our most optimistic forecasts and prognostication.

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

We can see these trends play out across the entire tech ecosystem. For example, by looking at the revenue growth rates that the Big Five tech companies reported last quarter. Each of these companies, worth over $1 trillion, is supposedly operating mature businesses at scale, and yet they are still reporting growth rates in the 20–60% range — as if they were VC-backed startups.

Speaking of VC-backed startups, Bessemer’s recent report on the top 100 private cloud companies was also astonishing. Their analysis showed that on average, the revenue growth rates for these large private companies — as an entire cohort — have risen to 90% year over year while the top quartile is growing 110%. Again, these are large-scale companies defying the “law of large numbers”.

Recreating the Entire GDP of China…in 5 Years

As noted, these powerful forces driving accelerating revenue growth as a result of very favorable underlying market conditions and rapid adoption curves have led to unprecedented increases in valuation. We wanted to quantify this and so looked at the handful of Big Tech companies mentioned earlier along with the top 100 next most valuable tech companies and compared their change in market capitalizations from five years ago to today.

Even we were astonished to see the result. That cohort of companies has grown from $5 trillion to $20 trillion — an increase of $15 trillion. That is a staggering amount of value creation in tech in the last five years. To put that figure in perspective, $15 trillion is equivalent to the entire GDP of China.

Further, in our analysis of the top 100 most valuable companies, we noticed that 27 of these companies are newly public — that is, they were still private companies five years ago, invisible to the public markets and operating solely in the VC market.

Speaking of the VC market, these forces and favorable conditions have also led to the substantial growth in the number of unicorns (i.e., companies who have private valuations > $1 billion). Specifically, the number of unicorns has grown from 39 in 2013 to 842 today, a cohort worth nearly $3 trillion. Add that to the public growth and you have $18 trillion of market value creation in tech in the last five years.

Conclusion: Let the Good Times Roll

Thus, if we pull the camera back on the environment, it is clear it has been an exuberant period of time — but there are a good number of rational underpinnings to that exuberance. And with the advent of Zoom investing and remote work, the points of friction have been dramatically reduced and we are all operating at a velocity of 11.

No one can predict whether future public valuations and multiples will continue to soar or if we are heading into a market correction. But as I talk to my peers in the industry, there is universal confidence that we participants in startupland are on the right side of important secular trends. The shift towards global technology adoption for enterprises and consumers is a trend that is simply not going away. The rate of adoption of smartphones, apps, cloud, AI, data proliferation, and all the investment sectors that we and others have operated in successfully for the last two decades continue to dramatically grow on a global scale.

As a result, VC investors are finding our opportunity set to be as attractive as it has ever been in history. Of course, if everyone realizes that — and everyone does — more capital is coming. A lot more. I may not have Alan Greenspan’s economic wisdom or hubris about an ability to predict the future, but of that last point, I am quite certain.

special thanks to my colleagues for their insights and input — Matt Guiney, Chip Hazard, Julia Maltby, Justin Mead, Jesse Middleton, and Anna Palmer — as well as Asha Tanwar for her expert research and analytical assistance.

A few months ago, I wrote about the ridiculous increase in velocity that we are seeing in the venture capital market in my post, Velocity and Venture Capital: 11. Now that summer is upon us, I want to reflect on the subtle value of slowing down, particularly from the standpoint of an entrepreneur.

Summer has always been a time to take a breath and slow down. Now that the United States is entering into a post-pandemic phase, we have yet another reason to take things a bit slower and stop obsessing over efficiency and speed. One of my more popular tweets in the last year was:

I was reminded of the value of slowing down in the last few days by one of my founders who is in the midst of closing a massive financing at a “unicorn” valuation. The company is on a tear, having grown 30x in revenue year over year. In a moment of candor, he confided to me, “I hope the new investors will let me slow down. We need to make sure we are building for scale and to do that, I need to be more deliberate in our growth.” Like the tortoise in the famous Aesop’s fable, sometimes we need to proceed slowly and steadily to win the race.

Here are a few of the benefits of slowing down, and where entrepreneurs may want to focus their energies this summer:

1. Solidify Your Scalable Team. CEO coach Marshall Goldsmith has a brilliant book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, about successful executives hitting points of friction as they grow, requiring changes in their behavior in order to continue to succeed. I often coach my entrepreneurs to assess their teams with a similar lens. The team that got you here may not be the team that will get you there. Take the time to consider team additions, upgrades, and perhaps coaching or facilitation to ensure you have the right aligned senior team that is ready, willing, and able to scale to the next level.
2. Think Different. When you’re running a fast-growing company, with all the execution demands and details involved, it is hard to take the time to be creative. Take the time this summer to do some offsites (yes, in person!) and brainstorm with your teams regarding the nonlinear growth opportunities that might be available to you. Consider transformative acquisitions, partnerships, new product launches, or international expansion in ways you might not have had the time and space to think through.
3. Pay Down Your Organizational Debt. Every fast-growing startup incurs debt along the way. Those forms of debt include technical debt (paying the price for historically putting off building a robust platform in order to meet short-term customer needs), process debt (taking shortcuts for the sake of expediency to get things done without stopping to make core business process robust and repeatable), and cultural debt (not investing in the culture and values because you’re so busy trying to avoid drowning in work and the demands of the market). Take the time this summer to pay down all forms of organizational debt. Don’t let the excuse, “we haven’t had the time” stop you from cleaning up some of the messes that were left in the wake of past sprints.
4. Build Enduring Relationships. Covid has made it hard to build authentic, deep relationships. Zoom makes everything more efficient, but more transactional. This summer, take the time to hone in on a few important relationships and make the effort to meet up face to face, spend unscheduled long stretches of time, and (gasp) just hang out. Personally, I’m terrible at slowing down. Zoom has brought out the worst of my tendencies in this regard and so am keen to heed my own advice here!

In Jim Collins’ book, Built to Last, he writes about the playbook for building an enduring company. Spoiler alert: slowing down to focus on team, culture, organizational design, business model and continuous improvement are all a part of the formula. So take a breath this summer and redouble your commitment to building a company and business that will endure.

Have a great summer!

When I was at Open Market in the 1990s, our CEO gave out the recently published book, Crossing the Chasm, to the executive team and told us to read it to gain insight into why we had hit a speed bump in our scaling. We had gone from 0 to $60m in revenue in four years, went public at a billion-dollar market cap, and then stalled. We found ourselves stuck in what author Geoffrey Moore called “The Chasm” where there is a difficult transition from visionary, early adopter customers who are willing to put up with an incomplete product and mainstream customers who demand a more complete product. This framework for marketing technology products has been one of the canonical foundational concepts to product-market fit for the three decades since it was first published in 1991.

Recently, I have been reflecting on why it is that we venture capitalists and founders keep making the same mistake over and over again — a mistake that has become even more glaring in recent years. Despite our exuberant optimism, we keep getting the potential market size wrong. Market sizes have proven to be much, much larger than any of us had ever dreamed. The reason? Today, everyone aspires to be an early adopter. Peter Drucker’s mantra, innovate or die, has finally come to pass.

A glaring example in our investment portfolio of market sizes is database software company MongoDB. Looking back at our series A investment memo for this disruptive open source, no SQL database startup, I was struck that we boldly predicted the company had the opportunity to disrupt a sub-segment of the industry and successfully take a piece of a market that could grow as large as $8 billion in annual revenue in future years. Today, we now realize that the company’s product appeals to the vast majority of the market, one that is forecast to be $68 billion in 2020 and growing to approximately $106 billion in 2024. The company is projected to hit a $1 billion in revenue run rate next year and, with that expanded market, likely has continued room to grow for many years to come.

Another example is Veeva, a vertical software company initially focused on the pharmaceutical industry. When we met the company for their Series A round, they showed us the classic hockey stick slide, claiming they would reach $50 million in revenue in 5 years. We got over our “is the market big enough?” concern when we and the founders concluded they could at least achieve a few hundred million in revenue on the backs of pharma and then expand, as the company’s initial name indicated, to other vertical industries from there. Boy, were we wrong! The company filed their S1 after that fifth year showing $130 million in revenue and today the company is projected to hit a $2 billion in revenue run rate next year, all while still remaining focused on just the pharma industry.

Veeva was a pioneer in “vertical SaaS” – software platforms that serve niche industries – which in recent years has become a popular category. Another vertical SaaS example is Squire, a company my partner Jesse angel invested in as part of a pre-seed round before he joined Flybridge. When Jesse told me about them — a software company dedicated to barber shops — I thought, “Nice. Sounds like a niche opportunity to get to $10+ million and then sell for a good profit.” When they graduated from startup accelerator YCombinator several years ago, they were barely able to scrape together a $1 million seed financing. As co-founder and CEO Songe LaRon shared with me, “Total available market size was the Achilles heel of our business in the eyes of investors.” Those prospective investors who passed ended up being dead wrong. Today, the company is doing hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction volume. A few months ago, Squire announced a $45 million financing at a valuation of $250 million.

I can’t resist one more example that brings this point of expanding market sizes home – the compound annual revenue growth rates (CAGR) over the last three years for the largest tech companies in the world have continued at a torrid pace, as noted below:

• Amazon: 30%
• Facebook: 29%
• Google: 18%

These companies are mature businesses with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and yet they are still growing at CAGRs of 20-30% per year!

Why is it that in recent years, wild-eyed optimistic VCs and entrepreneurs keep under-shooting market size across the tech and innovation sector? Upon reflection, I think there are two problems: the Chasm is outdated and Marc Andreessen was right about software eating the world.

Market Size Definitions: TAM and SAM

To understand our persistent problem with market size forecasting, let’s first deconstruct what is Total Available Market (TAM) size. A company’s TAM is a simple formula of the number of potential customers multiplied by the total revenue per customer. TAM is a snapshot of the total dollar potential in the entire market.

Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is the portion of the market that is an actual fit for your product or service. For example, the total global database market is $150 billion. That’s the TAM. But the SAM for MongoDB is the portion of the database market that is a fit for their particular approach, no SQL. That is projected to be $22 billion in a few years. That’s the SAM.

Typically, we are trained to think that only a portion of the SAM is obtainable within any reasonable window of time because of The Chasm and so the trick is to focus on attacking and expanding the SAM.

The Chasm: 1991-2011

In characterizing why it was so hard for technology companies to introduce discontinuous innovations, Moore framed a technology lifecycle that described different types of customers. He observed, “Our attitude toward technology adoption becomes significant any time we are introduced to products that require us to change our current mode of behavior or to modify other products and services that we rely on.”

He divided up the different customer groups based on their psychographic profile and attitude towards technology adoption into a bell curve: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. In between the innovators and early adopters, there is a small chasm. In between early adopters and the early majority is a larger chasm. The chasm, Moore explains, is because early adopters are open to change; they aspire to “get a jump on the competition…and expect a radical discontinuing between the old ways and the new.” In contrast, the early majority is “looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution.”

The image below from Moore’s book lays out the small and large chasms in the transition across all of the market subdivisions nicely.

The Chasm: 2012-present

In recent years, this model for technology has broken down. The reason, I submit, ties to Marc Andreessen’s famous Wall Street Journal article, “Why Software Is Eating the World.”

Marc correctly voiced what many of us in the industry felt when he wrote, “We are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.”

Over the last 10 years since that article was written, businesses now finally “get it”. And this year, in particular, the pandemic helped accelerate a global appreciation that digital innovation was no longer a luxury but rather a necessity. As such, companies could no longer wait around for new innovations to cross the chasm. Instead, everyone had to embrace change or be exposed to an existential competitive disadvantage.

Using Moore’s framework and combining it with Andreessen’s observation, I would argue that the early market overall (which includes innovators, early adopters, and the early majority) has grown substantially larger than before and, further, that due to competitive necessity, the early majority has embraced change and jumped across the chasm. And the portion of the market that the late Majority and laggards represent is smaller than ever before. A pictorial description of this phenomenon can be seen below.

This corporate imperative to embrace change, which extends to consumers who are more comfortable adopting technology products than ever before, coupled with the fact that software has become a more and more valuable portion of the world, is what is driving surprisingly massive market sizes.

The best companies are able to take advantage of this accelerated adoption curve by launching additional products once they have established an initial market toehold. Those additional products serve to increase their SAM – and do so at a rapid pace as they fly through the customer adoption process. Veeva, for example, today has 35 different products targeted at the sales and marketing function, regulatory affairs, and clinical. Squire, for example, has built upon their initial scheduling product to include payments and plan to launch additional modules to support banking and the online ordering of supplies. It helps that the rise of the cloud and advancements in software development tools and techniques are such that more rapid product development than ever before can be achieved. And, as noted above, companies are now more primed for rapid software adoption than ever before.

Conclusion

Looping back to our market size definitions, “software eating the world” has dramatically expanded the TAM while also catalyzing a compressed technology adoption lifecycle, which has dramatically expanded the SAM.

This trend towards rapidly growing and ever-expanding market sizes, and their signal as a leading indicator towards value creation, represents a promising development in our innovation ecosystem. Faster adoption cycles have a positive feedback loop on innovation: the more companies and consumers adopt new technologies, the more entrepreneurs can get funded to build the next new thing.