Venture capitalists look for more than TAM and valuation - Business Insider

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The Foundry Group director who's funded Fitbit and Zynga explains why market size is the most overrated factor for VCs investing in early-stage startups

This is true for acclaimed venture capitalist Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group. When he initially looked at the market opportunities of the companies he invested in that would go on to be successful he said that TAM was hard to discern. It could be zero, or it could be infinite. , looking at TAM isn't always helpful in a product-obsessed world — even if the startup seeks to replace an existing product.

In situations where TAM is either zero or infinite, the founding CEOs are a good indicator of how the company will scale. Some companies can fall apart if the founding CEOs get distracted and fail to take steps to help the company grow; other CEOs are intensely charismatic, but their persona hides cracks within the company's foundation.

"That's just a function of the fact that we're wrong, unfortunately, more often than we're right on these things,". "We have to at least go into the decision at the outset thinking: 'OK, what could this be? If this is successful, how big can it be and what can it look like?'"

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