PRODUCT-MARKET-FIT

Every bride in America has a Pinterest board. That's not a user base — that's a cultural institution.

We hit $100 million ARR in 18 months. Fastest in SaaS history. The secret? We built exactly what CISOs were begging for and nobody was delivering.

I was building a product that the market didn't need as badly as I thought. The checkout problem was real. The willingness to pay for a solution wasn't. That's the lesson.

Product-market fit is not when customers tell you they like your product. It is when they tell other people. Wealthfront grew almost entirely by word of mouth in the early years.

The best business plan is a customer who already wants to pay you. If you have to convince someone they have a problem, you're selling vitamins. Sell painkillers instead.

We back growth-stage companies that have already found product-market fit and can scale toward ten billion yen in sales.