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The best market size estimates are both surprising and convincing. To be surprising is the art of the presentation. To be convincing, you want to estimate your market size in at least two different ways. First, use Fermi estimates to determine the number of people who will buy your product (top-down market sizing). This requires general stats like 300 million Americans, 8 billion world population, 30 million US businesses, and domainspecific stats like 6 million annual pregnancies. Second, use SEC filings of comparable companies in the industry to get empirical revenue figures and sum these up (bottom-up market sizing). Bottom-up is generally more reliable. Be sure you are not drawing boundaries too big or optimistic. “If we get only 1% of China…” is a bad start. One of the most convincing things you can do with a bottoms-up estimate is to link or screenshot an invoice with a high price point.

Eric-Jorgenson_The-Anthology-of-Balaji.indd

readwise.io

One of Musk’s favorite words—and concepts—was “hardcore.” He used it to describe the workplace culture he wanted when he founded Zip2, and he would use it almost thirty years later when he upended the nurturing culture at Twitter. As the Model S production line ramped up, he spelled out his creed in a quintessential email to employees, titled “Ultra hardcore.” It read, “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.”

Elon Musk

Walter Isaacson

Only technical individuals innovate Summary: Sri Ram: Big companies are in this new model of managerial capitalism. What we do is we fund the throwbacks, such as Elon Musk and Henry Ford. He says managers don't expose themselves to risks involved in doing new things. "I think one of the world needs the bourgeois capitalist model," he says. Transcript: Speaker 1 You're going to need this management class. I go through all this to basically say, this then is the lens that I now provide basically for what we do in venture capital, what we do in startups, which basically, the way to think about It is the big companies, like the Fortune 500 and the big tech companies, are they are in this new model of managerial capitalism. At your point, Sri Ram, it's like, you can very clearly see that because you read the executive biographies and it's like, and you see it. It's like Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs. It's like all the above administration. It's all the markers of people who have kind of been in this elite management kind of role and now they're running these companies. What we do is we fund the throwbacks. And Elon Musk, we'll just use the example. Elon's a throwback. Elon's a throwback to Henry Ford. He's a throwback to the prior era of what Burnham called bourgeois capitalism, which is basically owner, proprietor, dictator of the company. And why do we do this? It's because companies that are run in the managerial mode don't do new things. Why do they do new things? Because managers don't do new things. The whole point of being a manager is that you don't expose yourself to the kind of risks involved in doing new things. You don't just try to basically stand that control job for as long as possible. I think one of the world needs the bourgeois capitalist model and they need the entrepreneurs to actually do what they do for anything new to happen. And so we basically keep that. We keep basically the original form of capitalism alive.

Marc Andreessen on Elon Musk, Good Startup Ideas, How to Have the Courage to Think Independently and Finding a Co-Founder

The Aarthi and Sriram Show

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