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You've seen them a thousand times. That pastel inverted pyramid or concentric circles of TAM/SAM/SOM. Maybe a Statista™ citation you know the founder picked out of Google images because the chart went up and to the right. A deck that claims their startup is chasing a $1.5T EV market TAM when the only part of it they’ll potentially, maximally own is some share of anodes used in some share of EV batteries.
And you've rolled your eyes every single time.
Here's the thing: You should have.
The TAM/SAM/SOM slide isn't dying because it's outdated. It's dying because it stopped being useful sometime around 2015, and founders—and investors—have been pretending not to notice.
Let's talk about why, and more importantly, what actually works in 2026.
Every VC gets pitched a $50 billion market by a pre-revenue founder. Every founder gets there the same way: Google "global X industry size," find an inflated number from a consulting firm, divide it three ways, and call it a day.
The result? A market slide that tells investors absolutely nothing about whether you understand your business.
And investors know it.
In countless post-pitch deliberations by investors I’ve personally witnessed, even they can’t agree between themselves what should be included in the TAM, SAM, or even SOM, for a particular startup.
I once observed this devolve into a literal shouting match between three experienced investors, one who felt that SOM should reflect only what can be accomplished by the time the current funding round is expended, one who believed SOM should reflect where they’ll be in five years assuming they raised additional anticipated funding rounds, and a third who felt the SOM should reflect “shoot for the moon” projections like a decacorn.
The truth is that TAM/SAM/SOM isn't a math exercise—it's a reasoning test. It reveals whether you actually know what business you're in, who you can realistically reach, and how you'll get there. Most decks fail that test before they get to the second bullet point.
Two founders could look at the exact same market opportunity and come up with completely different TAM numbers based on their ambitions, constraints, and how they define their addressable universe. That inconsistency means nothing. If I can't audit your logic, I can't believe your number.
Founders reverse-engineer their TAM backwards from what they think excites investors. VCs want "venture scale"—they need 100x returns to make their fund economics work. So of course every pitch says $10B+. It's not a market analysis. It's a negotiation dressed up as data.
Your TAM slide tells me the market is huge. But here's what I actually need to know: What can you do right now, with your current team, in the next 12 months? And then what does my capital enable beyond that? A $300B TAM doesn't answer either of those questions.
Here's what I've noticed advising founders in 2025-2026: The ones getting funded aren't the ones with the most impressive TAM numbers. They're the ones showing the clearest path from where they are today to where they’re going.
No fantasy. No Statista. No upside porn.
Instead, they're thinking about their market in three concrete steps:
Start from the bottom. Literally count prospects.
If you're building B2B SaaS for dental clinics, don't say "the global dental market is $300B." Say: "There are 200,000 dental practices in North America. We're targeting solo practitioners in the Pacific Northwest who are using legacy scheduling software. That's approximately 800 practices. At $500/month, that's a $4.8M annual revenue opportunity if we win them all."
That's defensible. That's auditable. That's real.
Your SOM is the market you can win with what you have right now. Not your dream. Your reality.
This is where you prove you're not delusional. You know what you can do because you've thought through:
If you can't define your SOM without hand-waving, you don't have a business model. You have a PowerPoint.
Here's where most founders get lost.
Your SAM isn't your "target audience." It's the market you unlock when you raise capital and deploy it intelligently.
If your SOM is 800 dental clinics in the Pacific Northwest, maybe your SAM is 8,000 clinics nationwide. Not because the market is bigger, but because your $2M Series A will:
The critical part: Show the math of how the capital gets you there.
"We'll use $X to hire Y sales reps, targeting these geographies, expecting Z CAC and L LTV" is infinitely more compelling than "next we'll go national."
Your SAM should be a logical multiplier on your SOM, with a believable path that capital directly enables.
Finally—and only finally—you can talk about TAM.
But here's the twist: TAM isn't "everyone in the world who might use your product." It's the logical extension of your focus.
If your SOM is dental clinics and your SAM is national dental practices, your TAM might be all healthcare practitioners that could use the same platform if you expand the feature set. Orthodontists. Optometrists. Veterinarians. Dermatologists.
That's not a hope. That's a product roadmap. That's what tells me your founder is thinking about market expansion as a series of logical steps, not as magic.
TAM is how big your obtainable opportunity could be if you successfully replicate your model into adjacent markets. It's the 15x potential—not because you'll own the world, but because you'll own the niche, own the adjacent niche, and own the niche after that.
If TAM/SAM/SOM is broken, what replaces it?
Sequential missions.
Think of your pitch not as "here's my enormous opportunity," but as "here's the staircase I'm climbing."
Each mission is a specific, achievable set of milestones that unlocks the next mission:
Mission 1 (Next 6 months, pre-seed to seed):
Mission 2 (6-18 months, seed to Series A):
Mission 3 (Series A and beyond):
Notice what's happening here: Each mission has specific customer profiles (ICPs), concrete deliverables, and measurable success metrics. And notice how the market grows as a function of product development and execution, not as a hand-wavy vision.
This is what investors actually care about. Not "we're in a $10B market." But "here's how we're going to carve out our share, piece by piece, and here's what we're doing to get there."
The reason VCs are shifting away from TAM is simple: It's irrelevant to how startups scale.
A $300B TAM doesn't tell me:
All of those things do tell me whether I should bet on you.
Sequential missions force you to think like a business operator, not a casino gambler hoping for luck.
They force you to:
And here's what's beautiful about this approach: It separates founders who are thinking strategically from founders who are just assembling a pretty deck.
It's hard to lie about a mission-based pitch. You can't hide behind big numbers. You have to show your work.
If you're writing your pitch deck right now, use this test on yourself:
If the answer is "no," you haven't done the work. You don't understand your market deeply enough to pitch it. Go back to your customer interviews. Count prospects. Build the math bottom-up.
If your SAM is 100x your SOM, you're dreaming. If you can't articulate why this multiple is achievable with capital, you haven't thought it through.
If it's the latter, delete the slide entirely. You'll have more credibility without it.
Here's what I see happening with founders who are getting term sheets:
They stopped talking about market size. They started talking about what they're doing.
They don't lead with TAM. They lead with traction—or a believable path to traction.
They show:
This is unsexy. It doesn't fill a slide with a beautiful pyramid and three big numbers.
But it works.
And investors can actually believe it.
TAM/SAM/SOM was always a proxy for a deeper question: Does this founder understand their market and how to capture it?
For years, founders and investors played a game where we pretended the answer was in the numbers. But we all knew it wasn't.
In 2026, we're finally admitting it: The question isn't "how big is the market?" It's "how are you going to win?"
Show me your SOM, backed by real customer research. Show me how capital extends your SAM with a specific GTM strategy. Show me your TAM as a logical product roadmap into adjacent markets.
Do that, and you don't need a pyramid. You need a staircase tied to future funding rounds. Support it with a key milestones slide that depicts the timing of those future rounds against what you'll accomplish with the moolah.
In my early flight training four decades ago, my instructor drilled this into my head: always be aware of “where am I, where am I going, and how am I going to get there.” A business plan is exactly like a flight plan. It’s as important to the founder navigating the startup day-to-day as it is to the message in the pitch deck.
And that's what gets you funded.
