We’re creating a treasure map to progress.
Too many startup founders are focused on advancing progress within the same few familiar areas, like SaaS or low-code dev tools. This over-concentration comes at an enormous cost: brilliant people who could discover the next massive leap forward instead grinding out incremental innovations that others would have soon found. These founders also miss the largest financial opportunities!
What you work on really matters — the number of startups competing for customers in a single $50B market can vary by a factor of almost 1,000. To make it easier for founders to understand where the untapped opportunities are, we started working on "treasure maps” that highlight large markets with low startup investment. This is an evolving project and we welcome feedback. We’ll post updates as more data becomes available.
Top Opportunities
Below is a list of massive markets, ranked based on their competitiveness. For each of them, we found a market size and the total amount invested over the last 10 years in Series A startups. We calculated a Competition Ratio for each (the market size divided by total invested in startups in that market per year).
Note: markets and companies are U.S. totals unless otherwise specified.
Click an industry to view a description, example startups, and key enabling technologies.
We’d love your help!
We’ve done our best to catalogue the industries above. But given the huge data surface-area, we’ve probably made some mistakes. If something looks off please reach out and let us know so we can provide this community the best data. You can reach us at peregrine at 50y.com.
Externalities
Not everyone cares about externalities. We do. In a future version of the map, we’ll incorporate externalities. Our goal is to encourage founders and investors to build their careers in markets where their effort has significant first and second order benefits for humanity. In the future, we’ll bring in top economists to help us quantify some of the externalities in a systematic way. Our hope is that happiness, freedom, fairness, ecological impact, beauty, and other aspects of a thriving society will make their way into this model via this future deep-dive into externalities. Ultimately, we want to consider all visions of progress towards a desirable future.
Note that the majority of these markets are larger than $100B so there are many subcategories to add. These graphs don’t take into account novel cheaper inputs that would facilitate the creation of cheaper products. We’ll be adding more industry pages that explore specific falling input prices over time.
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