I was at Amzn early '00s when we lost 95% of our market cap. Later at FB I negotiated a down-round in '09, and then in '12 our stock dropped 50% post-IPO. I was on the board of a public company that went bankrupt (Borders) and a start-up that went under (Hello). Some lessons:
The most transformative companies rarely emerge from someone else's problem statement. They come from founders who see opportunities that others miss, often in areas that lack established categories.
Facebook didn't fulfill a request for "improved college social networking." It emerged from Mark Zuckerberg's specific intuition about how Harvard... See more
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch: 20VC: Box's Aaron Levie on Why Founders Cannot Hedge Their Bets, The 2 Categories of Wrong Decision and How To Avoid Them & The Biggest Dangers of Being Over-Funded as a Startup
You can be the best product for small market, build a real company, and then from a position of strength, either stay there or attempt to expand to adjacent markets.
Or be undistictive in a huge market, out-advertised and invisible, never getting off the ground.