In every company’s journey, founders feel pressure from investors, competitors, their team, and even themselves to capture more market share. It sounds rational. It sounds ambitious. It sounds like progress. Market share becomes a convenient scoreboard: simple to track, simple to compare, and dangerously simple to misunderstand.
History is full of companies that numerically dominated their category yet lost strategically, and outliers that began with almost no market share but reshaped industries. Market share is discussed so reflexively in boardrooms that I felt compelled to make a sacrilegious statement this past week: Don’t confuse market share with winning.
While market share and winning often correlate, they do not always. Across Sequoia’s history from Apple to Airbnb, DoorDash, WhatsApp, and NVIDIA, the pattern is strikingly consistent. Outliers don’t chase market share. They build products and platforms so compelling that the market eventually moves toward them.
When the iPhone launched in 2007, Apple’s market share was negligible next to Nokia and BlackBerry. Steve Jobs wasn’t watching share numbers. He cared about delighting customers and attracting developers. Even today, the contrast is instructive. Apple holds ~57% of the U.S. smartphone market, but less than 25% globally. Yet, no one questions who is winning.
When Brian Chesky founded Airbnb, hotels owned nearly 100% of the market. Airbnb’s market share was effectively zero. But Brian wasn’t designing for share. He was designing a new way to travel, one built on belonging. Early guests and hosts told him, “This changed my life.” That emotional resonance, not the market share charts, revealed the company’s trajectory.
DoorDash entered food delivery as a late, small player after Grubhub, Seamless, Caviar, and others. Tony Xu focused on building a superior logistics engine for suburban markets that competitors ignored. When Uber Eats tried to buy market share with heavy subsidies, DoorDash increased its marketing out of necessity, but never lost sight of its core strategy: building a durable operational advantage. In the long run, DoorDash’s logistics engine, not its ad spend, won the market.
WhatsApp had little share in the US and concentrated on international markets. While others bloated their apps with features and ads, Jan Koum held the line: “No one wakes up excited to see more ads.” WhatsApp focused solely on fast, reliable messaging anywhere in the world. The experience felt magical. Growth became organic. Retention was extraordinary. Eventually, the numbers reflected the truth of the product.
In the early 2000s, NVIDIA did not command the largest share of the graphics market, but Jensen Huang bet on a future few could imagine: a world of programmable GPUs. CUDA looked niche at the time until the world suddenly needed exactly what NVIDIA had spent a decade building. Outliers win because they invest relentlessly in the inputs of sustainable advantage long before market share outputs make it obvious.
Perhaps, a better scorecard for building an outlier company comprises:
- Customer love – do customers stay, grow, and advocate?
- Quality of growth – do new customers improve the business?
- Defensibility – are you building advantages that strengthen with scale?
- Repeatability – can you grow without heroics?
- Inevitability – is the direction so strong that your vision is inevitable?
Apple, Airbnb, DoorDash, WhatsApp, and NVIDIA did not win because they dominated early market share. They won because they built something the world ultimately could not ignore. Remember, market share is a point estimate of size, and it might be fleeting. Winning demonstrates compounding power. Build something the world must follow.