A company which can't grow to $100 million a year is generally uninteresting to VCs, because that's approximately what they need to achieve to make their econom

A company which can't grow to $100 million a year is generally uninteresting to VCs, because that's approximately what they need to achieve to make their economics work out. They can tolerate base hits but that doesn't mean they endorse bunting as a strategy. PG and Naval Ravikant have written extensively about what drives the math here, but it's essentially 1) limited number of board seats available per LP at a fund, 2) target ownership percentage that has to imply, and 3) rarity of Google and Facebook relative to all the companies which did not drive the returns of the entire VC industry. You can hand-simulate the math: if you invest $5 million at a $20 million pre and expect 3 investments to fail, 3 to 2X, 3 to 5X, and 1 to 10X your investment, then you're hoping to sell for $100 million to $200 million (factoring in dilution). It's generally difficult to sell for $100 million with single-digit million revenue unless something very interesting happened in R&D. Angels have very, very different incentives and, relatedly, prices they get to invest at. They can have very, very happy results with companies which are doing, say, $1 million to $5 million in revenue. Accelerators/incubators are a mixed bag. In general, if they invest in you at low-enough valuations, then smaller exits work out pretty decently for them, particularly if you can get them at scale. 500Startups is pretty explicit about small exits being a planned-for driver of their strategy. YC has not, to my knowledge, been explicit about that, and to the extent they talk about desired company sizes tend to talk about Dropbox/Airbnb/etc. An elephant in the room: it is highly unlikely that people can adequately predict the size of a market at the business plan stage. PG has a good example here: it doesn't sound like a company founded to write Altair Basic obviously has an eventual enterprise value of $400 billion.