Home / Pitch the Vision Not the Wedge (September 2026)

When starting a startup you usually want to start out by focusing on a wedge. 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 exploring new things. A new startup has the freedom to do anything, but you have no resources and most startups fail, so you have to focus more than feels natural to have a small chance of success.

Some founders get so focused on their wedge that it's all they talk about when pitching investors. This is a mistake. 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, even if it sounds crazy, then explain how you go from black cars in SF to all transportation.

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 some traction. And you have to be flexible enough to transition between these two modes depending on the audience.