High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People

by Elad Gil

Once there’s product/market fit, then the main thing becomes taking the market—which is to say, figuring out how to get the product to the entire market, how to get dominant market share; because most tech markets tend to end up with one company with most of the market share. And that company tends to be all the value that gets created in that sector, from a return standpoint. That company also tends to have all the resources to do everything else that they want to do, including build new products. So winning the market is the big thing. The thing that is so essential that people need to understand is that the world is a really big place. The good news is that markets are bigger than ever. There are more consumers on the internet than ever before. There are more businesses that use software than ever before. There are more sectors of the economy where this stuff all matters. And so the markets are bigger than before. But that means that the challenge of building an organization, a model, and a distribution capability that can actually get the product to all the customers is an intense challenge. And of course the personality type of the technical founder who creates a breakthrough product, they don’t necessarily intuitively understand that that next part involves taking down the market.