"Growing the Pie" vs. "Slicing the Pie"
This is a short but important one as a guiding principle for my thinking to source & evaluate deals
I’ve been using the term “slicing the pie” vs. “growing the pie” a lot to describe our thesis on the latter at Portal Ventures. What do I mean by that?
Slicing the pie = similar to the concept of Sustaining Innovation per Innovator’s Dilemma, mainly aims to refine & make incremental improvement on existing products and offerings. Examples of this category that I see most often are
Increasing fragmentation of value capture among more participants
Increasing permutation of the modular thesis
Various aggregator/routing/discovery service
Many more - won’t name the specifics here.
Glowing the pie = create net new TAM on top of what’s gotten PMF to date - mostly referring to things surrounding today’s EVM liquidity. Broadly this can take three forms
A. Unlock net-new liquidity for defi outside of EVM (e.g. our BTC thesis)
B. Bring in non-crypto people, which can again take two forms
drastic improvement in UI/UX (Consumer dapps would fit here - though out of our thesis)
new forms of products that tailor to a whole new market segment that crypto is yet to penetrate (whether financial products or utility products - DePIN fit in this category)
C. Crypto entirely new sector that is crypto adjacent (e.g. our Urbit thesis fits here)
Sure, one could argue that “growing” and “slicing” are synergistic and inextricably linked, but you get my point. There’s also a slew of startups falling in the “in-between” buckets such as the rise of the recent “intent” layer. I personally do not focus here but fund theses vary.
I have lots of thoughts on the “slicing the pie” sectors that, while have merits, we do not focus on. If you want to discuss which one’s growing vs. slicing, feel free to reach out on X@dotcuriouscat
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