The only thing that matters

Ironically, once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit.

The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

Finally, to quote Tim Shephard: “A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product.”

You can obviously screw up a great market—and that has been done, and not infrequently—but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.

In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup.