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2026.08.25@vinnielauria

Nine Startup Strategy Terms in 23 Seconds, and Where Each One Actually Came From

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Vinnie Lauria, Founding Partner at Golden Gate Ventures, spends 23 seconds reading a list of startup strategy terms at the camera, drops a slide graphic behind each one, and closes with "if you know this maybe you should start a startup." The caption walks that back in its own words: "Knowing the words is table stakes. Knowing which ones describe your company is strategy." The terms on the list come from four separate decades and four different arguments, and about half of them can be checked against a real company in an afternoon while the other half only resolve in hindsight. This post traces each cluster to the book or article that produced it, fixes the places where the auto-transcript garbled the vocabulary, and sorts the list into the parts that are load-bearing and the parts that are just words.

What the video is

The clip runs 23 seconds. Lauria stands at a desk in front of a window, a laptop open in front of him, and a red "STARTUP KNOWLEDGE / Strategy Edition" title card sits over the whole video. Behind him, a stock graphic appears for roughly each term: a TAM-SAM-SOM funnel, a network effects triangle, a competitive advantage mind map, a "Timing in the Market" chart, a vertical-versus-horizontal SaaS comparison, a platform business model loop, and an aggregator diagram. At the time of this capture the video had 14,500 views, 912 likes, and 288 comments.

The spoken list and the caption list are not the same list. He says fourteen things on camera: TAM-SAM-SOM, beachhead market, network effects, switching costs, competitive advantage, barriers to entry, market timing, category creation, vertical SaaS, horizontal SaaS, platform models, marketplaces, aggregators, and red ocean versus blue ocean. The caption trims that to nine and drops competitive advantage, market timing, platform models, and marketplaces. The call to action is the point of the format: comment "MVP" and he sends the full list.

Transcription corrections

Three things need fixing before any of this is usable.

The auto-transcript renders the first term as "tam sam song." The term is TAM-SAM-SOM, and the on-screen graphic spells it out: TAM is Total Addressable Market, SAM is Serviceable Available Market, SOM is Serviceable Obtainable Market. Wikipedia's entry gives the same expansions, with "total available market" listed as an accepted alternative for TAM. Worth knowing that SAM is unstable in practice. It appears in business writing as "serviceable addressable market" and "served available market" as well, and nothing arbitrates between them, so two people in the same meeting can use the acronym and mean slightly different denominators.

The transcript also renders "vertical sass" and "horizontal sass." Those are vertical SaaS and horizontal SaaS. The graphic in the video gets it right and splits the two: vertical SaaS stacked against healthcare, retail, education, and finance; horizontal SaaS against CRM, marketing, analytics, and HR.

The third correction is in the video itself. The TAM-SAM-SOM graphic Lauria holds up spells the word "Servicable" twice. The correct spelling is "Serviceable." It is a stock image, not his typo, but it is on screen for two seconds of a 23-second video about knowing the vocabulary.

The four clusters, and when each one was published

Porter, 1979 and 1980. Switching costs, barriers to entry, and competitive advantage all come out of Michael E. Porter's five forces work. The chronology usually gets reversed. The Harvard Business Review article "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy" ran in the March-April 1979 issue and named the forces, including threat of new entrants and the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers. The book Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors followed in 1980 from the Free Press. The article came first. Citations that credit only the 1980 book skip the year the framework was actually published.

Moore, 1991, and Aulet, 2013. "Beachhead market" is a D-Day metaphor. Geoffrey A. Moore's Crossing the Chasm (1991, HarperBusiness) built the whole crossing strategy on the Normandy invasion: pick one narrow segment, concentrate everything on it, win it outright, then expand into adjacent segments. Bill Aulet's Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup (Wiley, 2013) later turned it into a named, numbered task, and that is where most founders meet the phrase today. One correction on the step number: "Select a Beachhead Market" is Step 2, not Step 3. Step 1 is Market Segmentation and Step 3 is Build an End User Profile. Aulet did not coin the term, he operationalized it twenty-two years after Moore.

Kim and Mauborgne, 2004 and 2005. Red ocean and blue ocean are W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's. The HBR article "Blue Ocean Strategy" ran in the October 2004 issue, using Cirque du Soleil as its lead example. The book of the same name followed in 2005 from Harvard Business School Press. As with Porter, the article preceded the book by about a year.

Category creation, 2016, and aggregation, 2015. Category creation has a specific modern source: Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney, published in 2016. They call the discipline "category design." Aggregators are newer still. Ben Thompson published "Aggregation Theory" on Stratechery on July 21, 2015, arguing that internet businesses win by commoditizing their suppliers and owning the consumer relationship, which makes user experience the decisive variable. Network effects and marketplaces predate both and have no single tidy origin, which is part of why they get used loosely.

Publication years above were checked against Open Library catalog records rather than taken from secondary summaries.

The "Market Timing" slide is about the stock market

The graphic Lauria holds up for "market timing" is worth looking at closely. It is a chart headed "The cost of Timing in the Market," showing the value of $10,000 invested in the S&P 500 from January 2003 to December 2022, with bars for what happens if an investor misses the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60 best days. The source line credits JP Morgan S&P 500 index total returns.

That chart is an argument for retail investors to stay in equities rather than trade in and out. It has nothing to do with a startup choosing when to enter a market. The two concepts share the words "market" and "timing" and nothing else. In a video whose thesis is that founders should know what these terms mean, the illustration for one of them is a different field's chart.

Which terms survive contact with a real company

The caption is right that reciting the list is easy, and it proposes the better test. Applied honestly, the terms split into two groups.

Checkable against your own company this week:

  • Switching costs. Count the contract notice period, the volume of customer data you hold, the number of integrations wired into your product, and the hours it would take an admin to rip you out. The caption's own version of this test is sharp: "would a customer leave you in an afternoon?"
  • Beachhead market. Name the segment, then count how many accounts are in it. If you cannot produce a list, you do not have a beachhead.
  • Vertical versus horizontal SaaS. This is a description of what you sell, so you either sell to one industry or you sell a function across many.
  • Network effects. Measurable. Does the value a user gets, or their retention, rise as the number of other users in their cohort rises? If the curve is flat, you have scale and not a network effect.
  • TAM-SAM-SOM. Arithmetic, which is also why it is the most gamed item on the list. The caption's jab about "the $10B market on your slide" is rhetoric rather than a figure, and it should not be repeated as one, but it names a real habit.

Only resolvable in hindsight, or not resolvable at all:

  • Market timing. No founder can verify it in advance. It is assigned after the outcome.
  • Competitive advantage. As drawn in the video's own mind map, it is a bucket holding skilled workforce, proprietary technology, cost leadership, and brand recognition. It describes a result, so it does not produce a decision.
  • Category creation. You find out whether you created a category when other people start calling themselves by your name for it.
  • Barriers to entry. Checkable for established industries, mostly aspirational for a company that is itself a new entrant.

What the list does not cover

The framing "if you know this maybe you should start a startup" sets vocabulary as the entry gate, and the list leaves out most of what actually determines whether an early company survives: how you reach customers at all, what a customer costs to acquire against what they pay, whether you can raise price without losing them, how long your cash lasts, and whether you can hire. Every term on the list is a way to describe a market. None of them is a way to run a company inside one.

Nine of the fourteen terms also come from books written for established corporations choosing where to compete. Porter was analyzing industries. Kim and Mauborgne were studying incumbents. Moore was the closest to the startup case, and even he was writing about products that had already found early adopters and needed to reach the mainstream. The vocabulary is borrowed, and that is fine, as long as the borrowing is visible.

Key Takeaways

  • The spoken list has fourteen terms, the caption has nine. Competitive advantage, market timing, platform models, and marketplaces appear only in the audio.
  • TAM is Total Addressable Market, SAM is Serviceable Available Market, SOM is Serviceable Obtainable Market. SAM also circulates as "serviceable addressable" and "served available," so the acronym alone is not precise.
  • Porter's "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy" ran in HBR in March-April 1979, a year before Competitive Strategy (Free Press, 1980). The article came first.
  • Kim and Mauborgne's "Blue Ocean Strategy" ran in HBR in October 2004, before the book (Harvard Business School Press, 2005).
  • "Beachhead" is Geoffrey A. Moore's D-Day framing from Crossing the Chasm (1991). Bill Aulet's Disciplined Entrepreneurship (2013) made it Step 2 of 24, not Step 3.
  • Category creation traces to Play Bigger (2016) by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney. Aggregation theory is Ben Thompson's, published on Stratechery on July 21, 2015.
  • The slide behind "market timing" is a JP Morgan chart about missing the best days in the S&P 500 between 2003 and 2022, which is a stock-market argument rather than a startup one.
  • The on-screen TAM funnel misspells "Serviceable" as "Servicable" twice.

Resources

Published August 25, 2026. Writeup generated from a favorited TikTok.