Home / Pitch the Vision, Prioritize the Wedge (September 2026)

It's widely known that when starting a startup you usually want to start out by focusing on a wedge - a very specific solution for a small and easy to target audience - then expand from there. For example, instead of creating the infrastructure for all transportation, you want to help a few friends in SF call a black car from their phone.

Most big companies are big because they have a product that works, so the hard thing for them is not getting addicted to what's working and risking exploring new things. Unlike a big company, a new startup has the freedom to do almost anything, but you have no resources and you're up against the odds that most startups fail, so you have to focus more than feels natural to have a small chance of succeeding.

However, some founders get so focused on their wedge that it's all they talk about when pitching investors. I think this is a mistake. For example, the market for black cars in SF is not very large and most VC funds operate on a power law, where they need one or two $1B+ exits to return the fund. So in your pitch you should emphasize the vision of becoming the infrastructure for all transportation, then say you are starting out with black cars in SF as a wedge and paint a realistic picture from how you go from there to the vision that can sustain billions in value.

What's hard is you have to be good at two opposing things. You have to be compelling enough that you can sell investors on a vision that is so crazy everyone knows you're lucky if you have even a 1% chance of success, while being pragmatic enough to focus your work and team on a wedge that is so small and unsexy that you can get real traction. And you have to be flexible enough to transition between these two modes depending on the audience.