Early stage founders cannot escape Tam. This is the concept of having a fully addressable market for startups to confuse and conquer. However, Jahanvi Sardana, a partner at index ventures, has reminded to all founders who are worried about finding TAM for their products and services.
“What was the market for previous searches on Google?” Saldana asked the audience at TechCrunch's 2025 all-stage event in Boston earlier this month. “What was the market for the operating system before Microsoft, or the market for the Cloud before Amazon?”
Saldana compares tam with surfing. Every few years there is a huge wave that the founder has to ride. First the Internet, then the mobile wave, then the cloud, and now she said the biggest wave of all: artificial intelligence.
“Have you ever shaped a product worthy of riding this wave?” she continued. “That's what we're going to fit into the product market.”
Which TAM bucket are you in?
Saldana places TAMs in three buckets: known, emerging and invisible markets.
The first known market already exists, when founders have to try and replace legacy incumbents and prove to investors why their startup ideas are better.
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“Everyone brushes their teeth,” she said. “We have to tell you why you're building a better toothbrush.”
Emerging markets are when certain sectors of the market use their products, which can become mainstream.
“Think about it before non-alcoholic beer cools down,” Saldana said.
Then there is the invisible market that Saldana calls the “biggest trap” and the market that is called “a little dark art.”
There is no market, and founders must essentially create it and provide investors with evidence of how innovative they are.
“Think about smartphones in 2006. No one knew they wanted it, and it changed the world,” she said.
At every stage, many of them are early stage founders, primarily asking questions about what investors want to see. For example, would investors want to see TAM slides on their pitch decks?
“It's okay to create that slide and talk about the mathematics behind TAM,” Saldana said, but she added that investors can get irritated if founders rely too much on industry metrics rather than having their own insights. Saldana also warned founders not to rely too much on industry reports. If founders are relying too much on external services and directing how they think about the market, they can show that they are not thinking deeply about the market they are trying to build.
“How do you size TAMs in the market, especially the larger market?” asked one audience member.
“Well, that question hurts,” Saldana said. After all, Index believed that it would be handed over in Airbnb or that its TAM was too small.
“The reality is that Airbnb has created an entirely new inventory, which is bigger than some of the biggest hotel brands now, and that has made a huge difference in behaviour about how people travel,” she said. “I want to focus again on what unlocks the supply, how does unlock the supply change your behavior?”
The audience also asked Saldana what would make the company stand out to investors like herself.
Saldana said, but she said it was really important. Ultimately, if founders can understand who their clients are and why they buy the product, the company should have no problem facing investors, she added.
“We're in a business that values founders more than markets, products, etc,” she said. “When you talk about your market, it's really the lens of your ambition.”