Just crazy enough to create, just sane enough to capture
In a recent Category Design workshop we held with Peter Goldie and Deborah Kattler Kupetz for our portfolio companies, we were introduced to the concept of the zero comma club, or the “Zero-Billion Dollar Market,” a concept they’d explored over past years that was popularized by Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital, as well as endorsed by leading investors like Ann-Miura Ko at Floodgate, and funds like Sequoia Capital.The notion of a Zero-Billion Dollar Market is that it’s something that you can see as an entrepreneur, but no one else believes. As we’ve talked about before, being consensus and correct is wonderful in many parts of life, but not in entrepreneurship. If you’re trying to create something new and valuable then it’s generally down the less traveled path, against the grain, and certainly not wildly obvious to others.Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, wrote the 1999 book entitled “Only the Paranoid Survive.” Only those crazy enough to be out there in the arena, or on the journey, and also paranoid enough to tilt at windmills, survive long enough to create their own reality and new market.This “gap” between perception and reality has to be closed by better understanding your customers. Of course these could be called surveys, but by reframing the conversation around a market opportunity that hadn’t been tapped, and inventing the category of “Customer Experience” or CX, they became the creators of a Zero Billion Dollar Market.