Geoffrey Moore, Author of “Crossing the Chasm”
Today, my guest is Geoffrey Moore, an author, speaker, and advisor who wrote the groundbreaking book Crossing the Chasm in 1991.
Since then, Geoff's other best selling business books include Zone to Win, Escape Velocity, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, Living on the Faultline and Dealing with Darwin.
Geoff began his management consulting career at Regis McKenna Inc, and then started 3 firms: The Chasm Group, Chasm Institute and TCG Advisors.
Today, he splits his time as a Venture Partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures and Wildcat Venture Partners and established high-tech companies, including Salesforce, Microsoft, Intel, Box, Aruba, Cognizant, and Rackspace.
In this candid conversation, Geoffrey shared the real stories behind the creation of his iconic Silicon Valley framework, his accidental path to writing a million-copy bestseller, and the internal traps that prevent large enterprises from innovating.
1. The Failure Behind the Framework. Geoffrey revealed that the concept for Crossing the Chasm actually came from his own painful experiences taking three different products into the mainstream market and failing to get any of them out. While working on a Kleiner Perkins-backed startup called Enhancis, he noticed that while early, risk-taking adopters loved the technology, mainstream buyers repeatedly rejected it because they demanded complete solutions and references from other conservative buyers exactly like themselves.
2. The Counterintuitive Niche Strategy. Observing this repeating pattern across many startups while working at the Regis McKenna consulting firm, Geoffrey realized that the exact tactics that create success with early adopters actively cause failure with the mainstream market. To successfully bridge this "chasm," he discovered that companies must do something that feels highly counterintuitive: temporarily abandon their dream of a mass market and focus entirely on a single, specific niche market that is in enough pain to spend time with the startup until their problem is solved 100 percent.
3. A $10,000 Niche Book. Remarkably, Crossing the Chasm was originally just a single chapter of a much broader consulting playbook Geoffrey had written for his firm. When his literary agent convinced him to expand that one specific idea into a full book, his publisher only offered him a meager $10,000 advance because they believed it was a highly niche topic that would likely only sell 3,000 to 5,000 copies. However, the book exploded organically, largely because engineers at companies like HP finally felt they had a logical, "systems approach" to marketing, leading the book to ultimately sell over a million copies worldwide.
4. The Resource Allocation Crisis. Shifting to his more recent book Zone to Win, Geoffrey explained why large, established enterprises struggle so deeply to fund new innovations. Unlike venture-backed startups where everyone from investors to employees fully expects a "J-curve" of financial losses before success, internal corporate stakeholders—from salespeople trying to hit traditional quotas to investors wanting safe returns—are highly conflicted about funding unproven projects. He argues that incumbent companies don't actually suffer from a lack of strategy, but rather a severe "resource allocation crisis," often aggressively starting a new initiative only to tragically take their foot off the gas halfway through.
