TLDR Founders · HEADLINES & TRENDS
DON'T CONFUSE MARKET SHARE WITH WINNING
Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter
Market share is a point estimate, not a scoreboard. When the iPhone launched in 2007, Apple's share was negligible next to Nokia and BlackBerry. Today, Apple holds less than 25% of the global smartphone share. No one questions who's winning. DoorDash entered food delivery late, after Grubhub, Seamless, and Caviar. When Uber Eats tried to buy market share with heavy subsidies, DoorDash focused on building a logistics engine for suburban markets that competitors ignored. The pattern across Sequoia's portfolio is consistent: outliers don't chase market share. They build something that the market eventually moves toward.