Venture Strategy and Business Planning

Introduction

A new venture rarely fails because its founders lack enthusiasm. More often, it fails because enthusiasm is not converted into a coherent strategic choice, a validated business model, disciplined resource allocation, and persuasive communication. Venture strategy explains how a young organization will create, deliver, and capture value under conditions of uncertainty. Business planning converts that strategy into an evidence-based set of assumptions, actions, milestones, financial requirements, and risk controls.

For an entrepreneurial venture, strategy is not a static document. It is a set of hypotheses about customers, competitors, technology, resources, regulation, and timing. A business plan is therefore most useful when it records what the founders believe, why they believe it, how they will test it, and what they will do if evidence contradicts their assumptions.

This chapter develops an integrated approach to venture strategy and planning. It covers mission and vision, objectives, positioning, competitive advantage, resource-based and dynamic-capability perspectives, business-plan architecture, pitch narratives, roadmaps, financial logic, evidence quality, and ethical governance.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, students should be able to:

1. Formulate a venture mission, vision, objectives, and strategic priorities.
2. Analyze positioning and competitive advantage in an uncertain market.
3. Apply the resource-based view and dynamic-capabilities perspective.
4. Develop an evidence-based business plan and distinguish evidence from assumption.
5. Construct a coherent pitch narrative for different stakeholders.
6. Build a venture roadmap with milestones, metrics, dependencies, and decision gates.
7. Evaluate strategic, financial, ethical, regulatory, and execution risks.

1. From Opportunity to Venture Strategy

An opportunity is a perceived possibility to solve a meaningful problem for a defined group of customers in a way that can generate sustainable value. Strategy begins when founders make choices about which opportunity to pursue, which customers to serve, what value proposition to offer, and how to compete.

A useful distinction is:

• Strategy: the integrated pattern of choices that guides value creation and competition.
• Business model: the logic through which the venture creates, delivers, and captures value.
• Business plan: a structured account of the opportunity, strategy, business model, evidence, resources, implementation, and expected results.
• Roadmap: a time-ordered view of priorities, milestones, learning activities, and resource commitments.

A strategy must contain choices. Statements such as “we will serve everyone,” “we will provide the highest quality,” or “we will become global” are aspirations rather than strategies unless they identify a customer, a basis of advantage, and a sequence of actions.

Entrepreneurial strategy differs from conventional strategic planning in three important respects. First, information is incomplete and forecasts are fragile. Second, resources are constrained, so opportunity cost is severe. Third, the venture may alter the market through experimentation, partnerships, or business-model innovation. Consequently, the plan should be both directional and adaptable.

2. Mission, Vision, Values, and Strategic Intent

Mission

A mission explains the venture’s present purpose: whom it serves, what problem it addresses, and the value it seeks to create. A strong mission is specific enough to guide decisions but broad enough to permit innovation.

A practical structure is:

We help [target customer] achieve [important outcome] by [distinctive approach], while [important principle or boundary].

For example, “We help independent restaurants reduce food waste by providing demand forecasts and purchasing recommendations, while protecting customer and supplier data.” This is more useful than “We aim to revolutionize food services,” because it identifies a customer, outcome, method, and responsibility.

Vision

A vision describes a desired future condition. It should express meaningful ambition rather than a forecast. The mission guides current choices; the vision motivates long-term commitment.

A vision can be assessed by asking whether it is:

• consequential for customers or society;
• understandable to employees and partners;
• ambitious but not physically or economically impossible;
• consistent with the venture’s ethical boundaries.

Values and strategic intent

Values specify principles that should remain stable even when tactics change. Examples include privacy, safety, accessibility, scientific integrity, customer respect, and environmental responsibility. Strategic intent states the venture’s central ambition and the capabilities required to achieve it.

Mission, vision, and values are not substitutes for analysis. They become strategically useful when translated into decisions about customer selection, product design, hiring, partnerships, pricing, and investment.

3. Objectives and Measures

Objectives translate strategic intent into outcomes. Effective objectives identify an outcome, measure, target, time horizon, and owner. The familiar SMART principle—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—is useful, but “achievable” should not be interpreted as unambitious. In a startup, objectives may combine performance targets with learning targets.

Examples include:

• obtain 30 paying pilot customers within six months;
• achieve a 60% conversion rate from qualified pilot users to annual contracts by month nine;
• reduce average customer onboarding time from 10 days to 3 days by the end of quarter three;
• validate willingness to pay among at least three customer segments before committing to large-scale production.

A venture should distinguish lagging indicators from leading indicators. Revenue and profit are lagging indicators: they summarize results after activities occur. Qualified trials, activation rates, repeat usage, and sales-cycle duration can be leading indicators because they provide earlier evidence about future performance.

Important commercial measures include:

Revenue and cost of goods sold must be measured over the same period and in the same currency. Gross margin excludes many operating expenses, such as product development and administration; it therefore must not be confused with net profit margin.

For a subscription venture, a simplified customer acquisition cost is:

The numerator should include the specified acquisition costs for the same period as the customer count. If campaign effects are delayed or customers come from several channels, channel-level and cohort analysis is preferable.

A simple contribution break-even estimate is:

This formula assumes one product or a constant sales mix, fixed costs that do not change within the relevant activity range, a constant selling price, and a constant variable cost per unit. The denominator is the unit contribution margin. If selling price equals variable cost, no positive break-even volume exists under these assumptions.

Worked example. A venture sells a device for $80, has a variable cost of $50 per unit, and incurs monthly fixed costs of $24,000. Unit contribution is $30, so:

At 800 units, contribution equals fixed costs before interest, taxes, and other excluded items. The calculation is a planning estimate, not a guarantee of cash solvency.

Objectives should be arranged in a hierarchy: a strategic outcome, the drivers that influence it, and the experiments or activities designed to improve those drivers. This prevents teams from optimizing a local metric—for example, downloads—while failing to create activation, retention, or revenue.

4. Positioning and Competitive Advantage

Positioning

Positioning is the place a venture seeks to occupy in the minds of a chosen customer group relative to alternatives. Alternatives include direct competitors, indirect solutions, internal procedures, and doing nothing.

A positioning statement normally identifies:

1. the target customer;
2. the customer problem or job to be done;
3. the category or frame of reference;
4. the distinctive benefit;
5. the reason to believe.

For instance: “For small clinics that lose revenue through appointment gaps, [venture] is a scheduling platform that fills cancellations quickly because it combines patient messaging with predictive availability.” The claim must be tested; attractive language is not evidence.

Positioning choices may emphasize low cost, premium performance, convenience, specialization, trust, speed, network effects, or social impact. A new venture should avoid claiming superiority on every dimension. Strategic clarity often requires accepting trade-offs.

Competitive advantage

Competitive advantage exists when a venture creates greater customer value than alternatives or delivers comparable value at lower cost, and when competitors cannot easily reproduce the basis of that advantage. A temporary advantage may be sufficient in an emerging market, but the plan should explain how it will be renewed or protected.

Potential sources include:

• proprietary data generated through use;
• specialized know-how and routines;
• trusted brand and customer relationships;
• switching costs or workflow integration;
• network effects;
• exclusive partnerships or distribution access;
• regulatory approvals, patents, or trade secrets;
• superior speed of learning and execution;
• lower-cost or more reliable operations.

A patent alone is not necessarily an advantage. Its value depends on enforceability, customer relevance, freedom to operate, and the venture’s ability to commercialize the protected invention.

Industry and stakeholder analysis

Founders should examine rivalry, substitute solutions, supplier and buyer power, entry barriers, complements, and regulatory forces. Industry analysis should be combined with customer research because an attractive industry can contain an unattractive segment, and a difficult industry can contain a defensible niche.

Stakeholder mapping is equally important. Employees, customers, investors, suppliers, regulators, communities, and affected non-customers may influence venture legitimacy and risk. A strategy that creates value for one group by imposing unacceptable harm on another may be commercially and ethically unsustainable.

5. The Resource-Based View and Dynamic Capabilities

The resource-based view (RBV) explains performance differences through resources and capabilities controlled by the firm. Resources may be tangible, such as equipment and cash; intangible, such as reputation and data; human, such as expertise; or organizational, such as routines and culture.

The VRIO logic asks whether a resource is:

• Valuable: does it exploit an opportunity or reduce a threat?
• Rare: is it controlled by relatively few competitors?
• Inimitable: is it costly or difficult to copy?
• Organized: is the venture arranged to capture the value?

A resource that is valuable but common may provide competitive parity. A valuable and rare resource may provide temporary advantage. A resource that is valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and supported by appropriate organization can support sustained advantage, although no advantage is permanently guaranteed.

The RBV has practical implications. Founders should identify which resources are truly strategic, which can be rented or partnered for, and which must be developed internally. A small venture should not automatically own every activity. Outsourcing manufacturing, using cloud infrastructure, or partnering for distribution may preserve scarce capital for activities that are more difficult to imitate.

The dynamic-capabilities perspective emphasizes how organizations renew resources in changing environments. Three commonly used processes are:

1. Sensing: identifying changes in customer needs, technology, regulation, and competition.
2. Seizing: committing resources to promising opportunities through products, partnerships, or business models.
3. Transforming: reconfiguring assets, structures, and routines as conditions change.

For example, a venture may sense rising demand for secure remote work, seize the opportunity with a focused product, and transform its architecture when enterprise customers require stronger compliance. Dynamic capability is not simply “being flexible.” It requires repeatable mechanisms for learning, decision-making, and reconfiguration.

A useful strategic audit asks:

6. Evidence-Based Business Planning

A business plan should be treated as an evidence architecture. Each major claim should be linked to its source, confidence level, implication, and proposed test.

Core components

A coherent plan usually contains:

1. Executive summary: the opportunity, solution, market, advantage, traction, requirements, and intended use of funds.
2. Problem and customer: the painful problem, affected segment, current alternatives, and evidence of urgency.
3. Solution and value proposition: what is offered, how it works at a high level, and why it is better for the target user.
4. Market analysis: segment definition, market access, competitors, trends, and realistic adoption assumptions.
5. Business model: revenue logic, pricing, channels, key activities, partners, and major costs.
6. Go-to-market plan: customer acquisition, sales process, onboarding, retention, and channel economics.
7. Operations and technology: production, service delivery, quality, cybersecurity, data, suppliers, and capacity.
8. Team and governance: roles, capability gaps, incentives, decision rights, and accountability.
9. Financial plan: assumptions, cash requirements, scenarios, sensitivity analysis, and milestones.
10. Risk and implementation plan: risks, mitigations, dependencies, decision gates, and roadmap.

Market sizing

Market sizing should avoid unsupported large numbers. A top-down estimate may begin with an industry total, but a bottom-up estimate is often more useful:

This is an estimate, not realized revenue. “Reachable customers” must be defined by geography, segment, channel, eligibility, and time period. Expected annual revenue should reflect price, usage, retention, and adoption assumptions. A plan should distinguish:

• TAM: total addressable market under broad theoretical conditions;
• SAM: serviceable available market within the venture’s chosen scope;
• SOM: serviceable obtainable market that the venture can plausibly capture.

The quality of a market estimate depends less on its size than on the transparency and testability of its assumptions.

Assumptions and scenarios

A plan should label assumptions as validated, partially supported, or untested. Scenario planning is more credible than a single precise forecast. At minimum, founders can model conservative, base, and upside cases by changing assumptions such as conversion, price, retention, delivery cost, hiring pace, and funding timing.

Cash planning is especially important. Profit and cash are not identical: a venture can report accounting revenue while waiting for customers to pay, or incur cash expenditure before recognizing an expense. A monthly cash budget should show opening cash, cash inflows, cash outflows, and closing cash.

All terms must refer to the same period. The plan should identify the minimum cash balance required to continue operating and the point at which additional funding or expenditure reduction becomes necessary.

Evidence quality

Evidence may include customer interviews, observation, prototype tests, letters of intent, paid pilots, usage data, competitor research, regulatory advice, supplier quotations, and financial records. Evidence quality is strengthened by behavioral data—such as payment, repeated use, or a signed commitment—rather than only stated preferences.

Founders should guard against confirmation bias, survivorship bias, small unrepresentative samples, and leading interview questions. A persuasive business plan does not hide uncertainty; it shows how uncertainty will be reduced.

7. The Venture Pitch Narrative

A pitch is not a compressed business plan. It is a decision-oriented narrative adapted to the audience. Investors may focus on scale, defensibility, returns, and team capability. Customers may focus on outcomes, risk, integration, and price. Lenders may focus on repayment capacity and collateral. Employees may focus on mission, role, culture, and credibility.

A concise pitch commonly follows this sequence:

1. Context and problem: what is happening and why it matters now.
2. Customer: who experiences the problem and how it is currently solved.
3. Insight: what the venture understands that existing alternatives miss.
4. Solution and demonstration: what is offered and how it creates value.
5. Evidence: traction, experiments, customer commitments, or operational proof.
6. Market and business model: who pays, how much, and through which channel.
7. Advantage and competition: why the venture can win and remain relevant.
8. Team and roadmap: why this team can execute and what happens next.
9. Specific ask: amount, partnership, introduction, pilot, or decision requested.

Narrative coherence matters. If the venture targets price-sensitive microbusinesses but relies on expensive direct sales and premium pricing, the audience should see either a credible rationale or a strategic contradiction. Every slide or spoken claim should answer a stakeholder question rather than merely display information.

8. Roadmaps, Governance, and Decision Gates

A roadmap connects strategy to execution. It should show outcomes and learning, not only a list of activities. A useful roadmap contains workstreams such as customer validation, product, compliance, commercial development, operations, finance, and team building.

Milestones should be observable. “Improve product” is vague; “complete a paid pilot with 20 users and achieve 40% weekly active use for eight weeks” is testable, although the target must be justified.

Decision gates prevent automatic continuation of weak initiatives. Examples include:

• proceed to development only after a defined customer problem is confirmed;
• expand a pilot only after reliability and retention thresholds are met;
• hire a sales team only after a repeatable acquisition process is demonstrated;
• enter a regulated market only after compliance responsibilities and costs are understood.

Governance should specify who can commit funds, change product scope, approve data use, accept safety risks, or alter strategic priorities. In a founder-led venture, informal speed is valuable, but unclear authority can create operational and ethical failures.

9. Applied Case: GreenRoute Logistics

The following is an illustrative case, not a report of an actual company.

Background and problem

GreenRoute Logistics is a proposed venture serving independent urban retailers. Small retailers often receive deliveries from several wholesalers, producing high transport costs, low vehicle utilization, and avoidable emissions. Existing logistics platforms are designed mainly for large chains and require complex integration.

The founders initially proposed a broad mission: “to make urban logistics sustainable.” Interviews with 35 retailers, six wholesalers, and four drivers revealed a narrower problem. Retailers cared most about reliable delivery windows and lower minimum-order burdens; environmental benefit was important but rarely sufficient as the primary purchase reason.

Analysis

The team identified independent retailers with five to twenty deliveries per week as the initial segment. Current alternatives were wholesaler-specific delivery, informal courier arrangements, and retailer staff collecting goods. The proposed value proposition was consolidated delivery with predictable time windows and transparent pricing.

The RBV analysis found no unique technology at launch. The potential strategic resources were retailer density, delivery-route data, trusted wholesaler relationships, and operational routines for coordinating small shipments. These resources would become more valuable as network participation increased, but they were not automatically rare or inimitable.

The central assumptions were:

• retailers would accept consolidated delivery if reliability remained high;
• wholesalers would share dispatch information;
• sufficient geographic density could be achieved in one district;
• route efficiency would cover delivery labor and vehicle costs;
• data protection and liability obligations could be managed.

Approach and solution

Instead of purchasing vehicles immediately, the team ran a six-week paid pilot using an established delivery partner. It limited the pilot to one district, three delivery days per week, and two wholesaler partners. The team measured on-time delivery, average cost per drop, repeat orders, retailer retention, failed deliveries, and complaints.

The roadmap used three gates. Gate 1 required ten paying retailers and acceptable delivery reliability. Gate 2 required contribution-positive routes for two consecutive months. Gate 3 required evidence that additional retailer density improved route economics without materially reducing service quality.

Outcome and strategic revision

The pilot achieved strong repeat use but revealed that retailers valued flexible cutoff times more than environmental reporting. Delivery economics were positive only on routes with at least 18 stops. The team therefore revised its positioning from “green delivery for retailers” to “reliable shared delivery for independent retailers,” retaining emissions reduction as a measurable secondary benefit.

The founders postponed geographic expansion and invested in dispatch routines, retailer density, and wholesaler integration. They also introduced a transparent policy stating what delivery and emissions data would be collected, who could access it, and how long it would be retained.

Learning points

The case demonstrates that strategy is shaped by evidence, not only by the founder’s original purpose. It also shows the difference between a resource and an advantage: route data became strategically useful only when combined with density, routines, partner access, and organizational capability. Finally, the pilot reduced uncertainty before a major asset commitment.

10. Challenges, Ethics, and Contemporary Developments

Common planning failures

Common weaknesses include inflated market sizes, unsupported claims of uniqueness, confusing features with benefits, ignoring substitutes, presenting unrealistic financial growth, and treating funding as evidence of product-market fit. Another failure is excessive detail without strategic logic: a long plan can still omit the crucial assumptions that determine success.

Ethical and regulatory responsibilities

Venture strategy must account for consumer protection, data protection, employment law, intellectual property, competition law, accessibility, environmental claims, health and safety, and sector-specific regulation. Founders should not use “innovation” to justify misleading claims, dark-pattern interfaces, discriminatory algorithms, unsafe products, or unauthorized data collection.

If artificial intelligence is used, the plan should specify the purpose, data provenance, human oversight, security controls, performance monitoring, and procedures for correcting harmful outputs. AI may accelerate market research, forecasting, drafting, and customer support, but generated content is not automatically accurate or legally usable. Human review remains necessary, particularly where decisions affect safety, credit, employment, health, or access to essential services.

Contemporary strategic conditions

Digital platforms, remote work, climate pressures, geopolitical disruption, and rapid technological change increase both opportunity and uncertainty. Ventures should consider resilience alongside efficiency: supplier redundancy, cybersecurity, cash buffers, modular technology, and contingency plans may be strategic assets. Sustainability should be integrated into the business model and measured through credible indicators rather than used as unsupported branding.

Best-Practice Checklist

Before finalizing a venture strategy and plan, founders should be able to answer:

• What specific customer problem are we solving, and what evidence shows it matters?
• Which customer segment will we serve first, and whom will we deliberately not serve?
• What alternatives do customers use today?
• What is our distinctive benefit and reason to believe?
• Which assumptions are most critical and least validated?
• Which resources and capabilities are difficult to copy?
• How will we sense change, seize opportunities, and reconfigure the venture?
• How does the business make money, and what drives cash consumption?
• What milestones and decision gates determine continuation or change?
• What ethical, regulatory, environmental, and data responsibilities must be designed in from the beginning?
• What exactly are we asking from the audience of the pitch?

Chapter Summary

Venture strategy converts an opportunity into a coherent pattern of choices about customers, value, competition, resources, capabilities, and implementation. Mission defines present purpose, vision expresses desired future impact, values establish boundaries, and objectives make direction measurable. Positioning identifies the place a venture seeks in a customer’s mind, while competitive advantage depends on value creation and on resources or capabilities that competitors cannot easily reproduce.

The resource-based view directs attention to valuable, rare, difficult-to-imitate, and well-organized resources. The dynamic-capabilities perspective adds the ability to sense change, seize opportunities, and transform the venture. A strong business plan links claims to evidence, exposes assumptions, integrates market and financial logic, and distinguishes profit from cash. A pitch presents the most decision-relevant elements through a coherent narrative, while a roadmap converts priorities into milestones, experiments, decision gates, and accountable governance.

Effective entrepreneurial planning is neither rigid prediction nor unsupported optimism. It is disciplined learning under uncertainty, conducted with commercial realism, ethical responsibility, and readiness to adapt.

Key Terms

Mission: The venture’s present purpose and intended value for a defined group.

Vision: A desired future condition that gives long-term direction.

Strategic objective: A measurable outcome linked to strategic intent.

Positioning: The place a venture seeks to occupy relative to alternatives in a target customer’s mind.

Value proposition: The promised customer benefit and the reason the offering is relevant.

Competitive advantage: A condition in which a venture creates superior value or comparable value at lower cost in a defensible way.

Resource-based view: A perspective explaining advantage through firm-controlled resources and capabilities.

VRIO: A framework assessing whether resources are valuable, rare, inimitable, and organizationally supported.

Dynamic capabilities: Organizational abilities to sense, seize, and transform in changing conditions.

Business model: The logic of creating, delivering, and capturing value.

Business plan: An evidence-based account of opportunity, strategy, resources, implementation, and expected results.

TAM: Total addressable market under broad theoretical conditions.

SAM: Serviceable available market within the chosen scope.

SOM: Serviceable obtainable market the venture can plausibly capture.

Leading indicator: A measure that provides early evidence about future performance.

Lagging indicator: A measure that summarizes results after activities occur.

Customer acquisition cost: Acquisition expenditure divided by the number of new customers acquired under defined measurement conditions.

Decision gate: A predefined point at which evidence is used to continue, change, pause, or stop an initiative.

Roadmap: A time-ordered plan of outcomes, learning, resources, and milestones.

Strategic assumption: A belief about customers, markets, resources, or execution that materially affects the plan.

Review Questions

5 Short Answer Questions

1. What is the difference between a mission and a vision?
2. Why should a venture identify substitutes as well as direct competitors?
3. What does the VRIO framework assess?
4. Why is a business plan better understood as an evidence architecture than as a prediction?
5. Distinguish a leading indicator from a lagging indicator.

5 Long Answer Questions

1. Explain how mission, vision, values, and objectives work together to guide venture decisions.
2. Discuss the resource-based view and dynamic-capabilities perspective, showing how they complement one another.
3. Describe the principal sections of an evidence-based business plan and explain their interdependence.
4. Explain how positioning can create clarity and strategic trade-offs for a new venture.
5. Discuss the ethical and governance responsibilities that should be incorporated into venture strategy from the beginning.

3 Analytical / Application Questions

1. A software venture claims that its product is “the best solution for every small business.” Critically evaluate this positioning and rewrite it for a specific segment.
2. Using the break-even formula, calculate monthly break-even units for a product priced at $120, with variable cost of $70 and fixed costs of $35,000. State the assumptions behind your calculation.
3. Design three decision gates for an early-stage venture of your choice. For each gate, identify the evidence required and the strategic action that would follow from weak evidence.

Multiple Choice Questions with Answers

Question 1

Which statement best describes a venture mission?

A. A forecast of annual industry growth

B. The venture’s present purpose and intended value for a defined group

C. A detailed monthly cash budget

D. A list of competitors’ product features

Correct Answer: B. The venture’s present purpose and intended value for a defined group

Question 2

In the VRIO framework, a resource that is valuable but common among competitors most likely provides:

A. Competitive parity

B. Sustained competitive advantage

C. A regulatory monopoly

D. Guaranteed profitability

Correct Answer: A. Competitive parity

Question 3

Which activity is an example of sensing in the dynamic-capabilities perspective?

A. Reconfiguring the organizational structure after a merger

B. Committing funds to a new product launch

C. Monitoring changes in customer needs and regulation

D. Reducing the number of suppliers

Correct Answer: C. Monitoring changes in customer needs and regulation

Question 4

A product sells for $50, has a variable cost of $30, and monthly fixed costs are $10,000. What is its contribution break-even volume?

A. 200 units

B. 333 units

C. 500 units

D. 1,000 units

Correct Answer: C. 500 units

Question 5

Which item is most likely a behavioral form of customer evidence?

A. A respondent saying the idea sounds interesting

B. A general industry trend report

C. A founder’s personal belief about demand

D. A customer paying for and repeatedly using a pilot

Correct Answer: D. A customer paying for and repeatedly using a pilot

Question 6

What is the main purpose of a positioning statement?

A. To identify the venture’s desired place relative to alternatives for a target customer

B. To list all possible customer segments without prioritization

C. To replace financial forecasting

D. To describe internal reporting relationships

Correct Answer: A. To identify the venture’s desired place relative to alternatives for a target customer

Question 7

Which formula correctly represents closing cash for a defined period?

A. Opening cash − cash inflows + cash outflows

B. Opening cash + cash inflows − cash outflows

C. Revenue − fixed costs only

D. Assets + liabilities − equity

Correct Answer: B. Opening cash + cash inflows − cash outflows

Question 8

Why are decision gates useful in an entrepreneurial roadmap?

A. They guarantee that a venture will succeed

B. They eliminate the need for customer research

C. They connect continuation decisions to predefined evidence

D. They ensure that all plans remain unchanged

Correct Answer: C. They connect continuation decisions to predefined evidence

Question 9

Which statement about TAM, SAM, and SOM is correct?

A. SOM is always larger than TAM

B. TAM refers only to customers already acquired

C. SAM is the realistically obtainable share after sales begin

D. SOM is the portion of the serviceable market the venture can plausibly capture

Correct Answer: D. SOM is the portion of the serviceable market the venture can plausibly capture

Question 10

Why should a pitch be adapted to its audience?

A. Different stakeholders evaluate different forms of value, risk, and evidence

B. Investors and customers always require identical information

C. Adaptation allows unsupported claims to replace evidence

D. A pitch should contain no business-model information

Correct Answer: A. Different stakeholders evaluate different forms of value, risk, and evidence