Geoffrey Moore

First of all, shut the God damn laptop. Just don't open it and start with... 'We're here because we've been working with some people in your industry and we understand there's this really serious problem around document management or around Wi-Fi access or whatever it is, and we believe that your company might have it, is that true?'

You know you've crossed the chasm when you say, 'I don't have to raise any more venture capital. Now, I may want to because I have ambitions to be globally dominant.' But you get to raise it on your nickel and on your timeline, not on, 'Oh my God, I'm running out of money.'

Discounting does not reduce risk. In fact, it might even increase risk because this vendor might say, 'Well, yeah, I'll give you a better price, but now I'm not going to give you the extra support or we'll have a change of scope.'

You want to have a target segment that is big enough to matter, small enough to lead and a good fit with your crown jewels. That's the formula.

The tendency when you're in the chasm is, 'I just need more customers. I should take any customer I could find,' because we need revenue. It's like taking a match and running it back and forth under a log. It's not going to light the log. So how do you start a fire? Well, you start it by putting a little kindling, little crumpled up paper, and you hold the match in one place until the fire starts.

That's why adjacency is so important. If you light the fire, the piece of kindling is here, but the log is in the other room. That doesn't work.

If you're a category leader, if you're like Oracle and Databases, you're 40 years in. You're still the leader, because the ecosystem organized around you. But when you're little, the only way you can get an ecosystem to organize around you is to go after a segment where you're a big fish in that pond.

Before the chasm, the customers you work with are people who say, 'We believe what you believe.' After the chasm, they say, 'I'm not sure about that, but we need what you have.'