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“Tell me about the whole market first,” the late Jack Gifford, Maxim Integrated Products founding CEO, said to me.
We were meeting at the Peppermill in Cupertino like we always did for our Tuesday morning breakfast meetings. For this meeting it was me, Ziya who was my boss, Dave Fullagar who was the VP Engineering, and I believe Len Sherman who ran applications engineering at the time.
Just to be clear, I was really presenting to an audience of one, Gifford. The others would add information if needed.
Jack had a very systematic way of analyzing business opportunities. It was always the Total Available Market, or TAM, as a starting point.
You need to know the TAM, so you can explain why you are focused on a particular Served Available Market (SAM).
Over the years of working with Jack, I had seen others make the mistake of starting with the SAM. “It’s a $100M/year market,” an unsuspecting GM would say to Jack.
Jack would always reorient them to explaining how big the whole market was.
So, I explained how big the TAM for the business I was running at the time was. Then I broke down the TAM into the various sub-markets that existed.
