This deep dive expands on the Loop Asia conversation with Jed Ng, angel investor and former RapidAPI operator.

Ask most founders how big their addressable market is and they'll show you a TAM slide. Ask Jed Ng, and he wants to know something narrower: can this company, in this market, realistically hit $100 million in revenue. "If I'm evaluating a company for its potential to get to a hundred million dollar top line, it's very hard to find the right business that can do it within Singapore," he told me — a working filter he applies before he'll take a market-sizing conversation seriously.

The number matters less than the discipline behind it

$100 million is Ng's bar, calibrated to his thesis — B2B software, seed-plus through Series A or B. A different investor would set a different number; what's transferable is the move: pick a revenue target that represents real success, then ask honestly whether the home market can get there without expansion. Most companies skip that step and discover the answer mid-growth, when the domestic curve flattens and nobody's planned for what's next.

Constraint creates discipline; abundance creates delay

Companies born in small markets don't get a choice. Ng's example is Israel: "every company that is founded there knows that they need to get out of the market... they think ahead and long term out of necessity from day one." France or Germany sit in the middle, in what Ng calls "almost a middle income trap": big enough that staying domestic is plausible, not big enough, usually, to reach the scale the company wants.

Singapore, in Ng's account, is the extreme version of that trap — precisely because it's such a good place to build a company. "It's very hard to drive innovation and sustain that in a very comfortable environment where there are a lot of opportunities and there isn't as much of an economic push for survival that drives innovation."

Turning this into an operating question

For a growth-stage leader past product-market fit — not necessarily one raising venture capital — the useful version of Ng's filter is this: pick the outcome that would count as real success in three to five years, then test honestly whether the current market, systems and team could deliver it without structural change.