Your startup idea probably isn’t venture-scale

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👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. What do Product Hunt, Trello, Balsamiq, Basecamp, Things, DuckDuckGo, Brain.fm, and many of your favorite products have in common? They’re beloved, have millions of users, and likely generate tens of millions of dollars a year, but, like your idea and 99.9% of new startup ideas, they will never be “venture-scale.” And that’s OK. You can build a killer business without going the VC route. And you probably should. A simple rule of thumb for what makes an idea venture-scale is having a path to $100 million a year in revenue and hitting $1 billion+ valuation, in 10 years. Essentially, can you get big, fast? This is what VCs need to invest in in order to make their fund economics work. Very few ideas can hit this scale, and it’s important that you recognize this before you take venture capital (mor

Your startup idea probably isn’t venture-scale And that’s OK Lenny Rachitsky May 16, 2023 ∙ Paid 233 6 16 Share 👋 Hey, I ’ m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. Subscribe Q: I’m told my idea isn’t “venture-scale.” What does that mean? What do Product Hunt , Trello , Balsamiq , Basecamp , Things , DuckDuckGo , Brain.fm , and many of your favorite products have in common? They’re beloved, have millions of users, and likely generate tens of millions

Your startup idea probably isn’t venture-scale

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