In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was disruption. Then came the PowerPoint presentation, and the Word was made flesh in the form of a Total Addressable Market analysis.

Startup evangelists and VC adherents have elevated market sizing to a ritualistic art form that serves more to demonstrate intellectual sophistication than to illuminate actual opportunity. The result: a form of intellectual domestication. Wild ideas are systematically tamed, measured, and (ultimately) diminished by the very process meant to validate them.

Founders dutifully present their slides: "The global widget market is valued at $47.3 billion and growing at 12.4% annually." They slice and dice - serviceable addressable market, serviceable obtainable market, beachhead strategies. Each calculation grows more precise, more defensible, more divorced from the reality of human behavior and disruption.

The smartphone didn't show up fully formed from a TAM analysis of the "mobile communication device market." The internet wasn't born from sizing the "global information exchange opportunity."

But by worshipping at the altar of TAM, we've created a system that selects for incremental improvements over breakthroughs, for ideas that fit neatly into existing market categories rather than those that might create entirely new ones. We've traded the prophet's vision for the accountant's precision, and in doing so, we’ve lost the nature of disruption itself.

The Cartographers of Impossibility

When Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, no consulting firm calculated the total addressable market for "voice transmission over wire." The concept was so foreign to existing frameworks that it would have been impossible to quantify using conventional metrics. The telephone had to create its own market, establishing new categories of human behavior and economic activity that simply had not existed before.

When Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in 1989, he was not responding to a carefully researched market opportunity for "hypertext information systems." He was solving a personal problem at CERN, creating a tool that would fundamentally alter how humans access and share information. The web's value lay in creating entirely new forms of human interaction and commerce - not in serving an existing addressable market.

This = what we might call the "cartographer's paradox." Early maps could only chart known territories - and TAM analysis can only measure markets that already exist or can be reasonably extrapolated from current conditions. But the best ideas operate in the realm of the unmappable, creating new territories rather than simply claiming larger portions of existing ones.

The most profound innovations have tiny addressable markets precisely because they are so novel that the infrastructure, customer behavior, and supporting ecosystem necessary for their success do not yet exist.

By definition, good ideas create their own markets rather than serving pre-existing ones. When we insist on measuring them by traditional TAM metrics, we are essentially asking Columbus to justify his voyage by calculating the existing trade routes to the Indies.

Segmentation Ain’t Everything

Modern TAM analysis creates markets through the act of segmentation - breaking down broad categories into increasingly specific subcategories, each with its own addressable market calculation. And yes - this might seem methodical and thorough. But it doesn’t come cheap.

It encourages a reductive mindset that sees opportunity through the lens of existing categories. When entrepreneurs are forced to articulate their ideas in terms of "the market for X" or "the Y industry," they squeeze their concepts into pre-existing boxes.

This categorization process inevitably trims away the edges that make products even mildly interesting, smoothing rough corners and filing down sharp points until the concept fits comfortably within established frameworks.

The segmentation imperative creates perverse incentives for idea development. Instead of pursuing concepts that (could) fundamentally alter how people live and work, entrepreneurs learn to focus on ideas that can be easily categorized and measured. The result - a widespread bias toward incremental innovation.

Tech might look unrecognisable today if venture capitalists in the 1990s had demanded detailed TAM analyses for "search engines" or "social networking platforms." These concepts were so novel that they would have been impossible to quantify using conventional metrics. Yahoo - followed by Google - didn’t set out to capture the "market for web search" because such a market barely existed when the company was founded. Instead, it created an entirely new category of human behavior and economic activity.

The segmentation process fragments potential into digestible pieces, each evaluated separately rather than as part of a coherent whole.

It’s an analytical approach that might work for understanding existing markets, but it is poorly suited to evaluating ideas that derive their power from integration and synthesis rather than from serving discrete market segments.

The Comfort of the Quantifiable

Numbers feel solid, measurable, and objective in ways that ideas don’t. This isn’t a complex idea.

When faced with a novel concept, the natural human tendency is to seek familiar reference points, to translate the unknown into the known. TAM analysis provides this psychological comfort by reducing wild possibilities to manageable spreadsheet cells.

By insisting that all ideas be quantified before they can be pursued, we create a selection mechanism that systematically filters out the most transformative possibilities. The very act of quantification forces ideas to conform to existing measurement frameworks.

The quantification imperative creates a false sense of precision around inherently imprecise estimates. TAM calculations involve multiple layers of assumption and approximation, each introducing additional uncertainty into the final result. But these calculations are presented and received as if they were factual rather than speculative, creating an illusion of analytical rigor that impedes clear thinking about opportunity and risk.

This false precision is dangerous. When we attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, we risk missing the forest for the trees, focusing on measurable details while overlooking everything / anything that makes an idea worth pursuing in the first place.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar of Ideas

TAM analysis = the cathedral approach: centralized, hierarchical, and built around comprehensive planning and analysis. Revolutionary innovation follows the bazaar model: distributed, experimental, and driven by emergence, not planning.

In the cathedral model, ideas must be fully specified and analyzed before development can begin. Market opportunities must be identified, customer segments defined, and competitive landscapes mapped. This works for incremental innovations that build on existing foundations, but it struggles with anything that cannot be fully understood until it’s built and tested in the real world.

The bazaar model embraces uncertainty as a fundamental feature of innovation rather than a problem to be solved through better analysis. Ideas develop through experimentation and iteration, with market validation occurring through actual use rather than theoretical calculation.

The cathedral approach to innovation produces ideas that are fully formed but ultimately conventional, while the bazaar approach generates concepts that may be rough around the edges but possess genuinely unique properties. When we insist on comprehensive TAM analysis before pursuing novel ideas, we effectively force all innovation into the cathedral model, eliminating messy - but productive - experimentation.

The Invisible Hand of Bureaucracy

Adam Smith's invisible hand described how individual self-interest could lead to beneficial collective outcomes through the mechanism of market competition. TAM worship creates its own invisible hand, but it operates in reverse: individual rational behavior leads to collectively irrational outcomes through the mechanism of analytical bureaucracy.

Each participant in the TAM analysis process behaves rationally from their individual perspective. Market researchers want to provide thorough, defensible analyses. Investors want to make informed decisions based on solid data. Entrepreneurs want to demonstrate that their ideas address significant market opportunities. Management consultants want to deliver comprehensive strategic frameworks. Everyone is acting reasonably within their own context and incentive structure.

But the collective result of these individually rational behaviors is a system that discriminates against disruption. It’s precisely the comprehensiveness and rigor of TAM analysis that make it poorly suited to evaluating concepts that operate outside existing analytical frameworks. The more thorough the analysis, the more likely it is to miss or undervalue intangible opportunities.

The invisible hand of bureaucracy guides resources away from innovation and toward incremental improvements that can be easily quantified and analyzed. And we get what we get: a form of innovation that is technically proficient but ultimately conservative, advancing existing paradigms rather than creating new ones.

The Failure of Measured Revolution

The fundamental flaw of TAM worship: ideas derive their power from their ability to transcend existing categories and create new forms of value that cannot be measured using conventional metrics.

When we insist on measuring them anyway, we force them to conform to the frameworks they are meant to transcend.

The early stages of platform development might appear to serve tiny addressable markets, making them vulnerable to rejection by TAM-focused analysis. But these same platforms can (eventually) create enormous value by enabling new forms of interaction and commerce that were previously impossible.

TAM analysis treats uncertainty as a problem to be solved through better research and analysis, when in fact uncertainty is a basic, inherent feature of disruptive tech. Innovation depends on our ability to create space for ideas that cannot be easily measured or categorized, that operate outside existing frameworks, that create value through transformation rather than optimization.

The greatest ideas may be those that make our current TAM calculations look as quaint as medieval debates about celestial mechanics.