Don’t pick a lousy market (feat. Mike Goguen)

You can have the best company and the best team. But if you pick a lousy market you will certainly fail. That is the direction of the advice given by Mike Goguen from Sequoia Capital in The Current Investment Landscape with Mike Goguen:

Jump to 18m04s with Mike Goguen @ Wharton School 2013 advice at 18m4s

..in terms of convincing the world to do something they don’t already recognize they need to do, or have a pain they don’t really know they have, that’s a little hard.

So, you can have the best product [ and the] best team, and if you pick a lousy market, is going to be rough going. (Mike Goguen @ Wharton School, 2013, 18:04)

But Mike is not asking for startups to focus in now-larger markets as well. So entrepreneurs should not get confused with the idea of going for an existing known market of intense competition. That would be the worse case scenario, (Guy Kawasaki @ Berkeley Haas, 2013)

On the other hand, an early venture VC firm may well be interested in the new solution that yet needs to be told to the world: A solution that comes out of real necessity (such as Dropbox, Yahoo!, Cisco) and a solution that will be pulled from the market once the world starts to get it.

According with this idea, the entrepreneur should consider some strategic steps for their next start-up idea:

• Develop a bold vision and improve your awareness for ambiguity
• Have a strong Point of View (POV) and articulate the From-To
• Consider your POV to articulate how the world is currently approaching the problem, and how you do differently

References

Wharton School. (Mar 27, 2013). The Current Investment Landscape with Mike Goguen (Sequoia Capital) [video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01fX8pIAY3U

Berkeley Haas. Guy Kawasaki: The Top 10 Mistakes of Entrepreneurs. Published on Mar 11, 2013 [video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHjgK6p4nrw