The Markets Hiding in Plain Sight

I had a rule at TaskRabbit: What gets measured gets managed. Meaning, if you aren’t measuring the right metrics, reviewing the analytics, and understanding the marketplace through its own data, you can’t begin to manage, improve, or scale your business.

The care economy didn’t become a $648 billion market overnight. Childcare, eldercare, and caregiving that make the rest of the economy possible have been happening all along.

What changed was that we started measuring it.

That idea came up in my recent conversation with Erin Harkless Moore, Managing Director of Investments at Pivotal, and it has stayed with me. Because once we put a number around something, we don’t just understand its size differently. We start to value it differently.

And that can change where capital flows.

In investing, I think there’s another piece to it. What gets measured becomes visible.

Investors love data. We want to know how big a market is, how fast it’s growing, and where the evidence points.

But data can also create a blind spot. When something hasn’t been studied, measured, or even defined as a market, it’s much harder to make the case for investing in it. And when capital hasn’t historically flowed to an area, we assume there's a reason.

That’s exactly what happened with the care economy.

The need was never hidden. Parents have always needed childcare. Families have always cared for aging relatives. Millions of people, disproportionately women, have made career and financial decisions around caregiving.

What was missing wasn’t the need. It was our ability to see its scale.

Erin talked about the importance of naming and sizing the care economy. Once you put a number around something that has historically been overlooked, it becomes harder to dismiss and easier to value.

That’s what I find so interesting. Measurement doesn’t create the opportunity. It makes the opportunity visible.

Which makes me wonder what else we might be overlooking simply because we haven’t figured out how to measure it yet.

Another dynamic is at work here, too. When the environment gets uncertain, we naturally move toward what we already know. Capital gravitates toward established patterns, familiar opportunities, and places where other investors have already found success.

But Erin and Pivotal’s work pushes against that instinct. Her focus on overlooked people and markets starts from the possibility that opportunity may exist precisely where attention hasn’t gone yet.

That doesn’t mean something is valuable simply because it has been overlooked. It means being overlooked can prevent something from getting the examination it deserves.

And seeing an opportunity is one thing. Being willing to act on it before everyone else agrees is another.

This is where conviction matters.

Toward the end of our conversation, Erin talked about conviction as something that has to be backed by homework. You find the data. You do the research.

You build enough understanding to hold on to what you believe, even when the naysayers show up.

I recognize that feeling.

When I was building TaskRabbit, there weren’t years of market data proving that people would use technology to hire someone in their community to assemble furniture, run an errand, or help around the house.

The behavior existed, but the category didn’t.

I had to believe that what I was seeing could become something much bigger before there was a neat set of numbers to prove it.

That’s an important distinction. Conviction isn’t ignoring the evidence. It’s being willing to look for evidence in places other people haven’t thought to look yet.

Erin sees a version of this happening in women’s health. For decades, huge parts of women’s health were understudied and underfunded. That lack of attention shaped what we understood, what got built, and what investors saw as an opportunity.

The same dynamic can show up anywhere. A problem can be widespread without being recognized as a market. People can spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and money working around something without anyone stepping back and seeing the larger opportunity.

That’s why I think it’s worth paying attention to the disconnect between what matters in people’s lives and where capital is flowing.

Changing where capital flows requires evidence, but sometimes it also requires changing the story around what we value.

That’s part of why I started Breaking Precedent in the first place. I wanted to tell the stories of people who saw something differently and acted on it before everyone else understood what they were seeing.

By the time a new market has a name, years of data, established companies, and investors competing to get in, seeing the opportunity is the easy part.

The interesting part happens earlier, when the evidence is emerging, and someone is willing to look more closely at what others have dismissed or simply failed to see.

That requires data. It requires homework. And, as Erin reminded me, it requires conviction.

Because sometimes the opportunity isn’t new. We’re just finally learning how to measure it.

This week pairs with our latest episode of Breaking Precedent, where I sit down with Erin Harkless Moore to explore how we recognize opportunity in markets that have historically been overlooked. We talk about what happens when you start naming and measuring the things that have been hiding in plain sight, from the $648 billion care economy to women’s health, and why conviction matters when the data hasn’t caught up yet.

Thank you to our Precedent Breaking Partners, Justworks, Taskrabbit, and SquaredAway, for supporting this season’s conversations!