This weekend, I finished reading Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, which is the autobiography of Michael Dell. The book was first published in 1998, so it covers only Michael’s (remarkable!) early journey. Michael turned $1,000 in 1984 into a company doing over $12 billion in revenue during the fiscal year ending February 1, 1998. That’s an astonishing level of growth in 14 years.

Michael is an incredible entrepreneur. He was in his early thirties when this book was published. A lot of Dell’s success can be attributed to him as its leader. (Side note: He’s still CEO over 25 years later.) But in the book, Michael highlighted another factor that led to Dell’s success: the PC market. In 1984, Michael unknowingly stumbled into a market in its infancy that exploded in growth for various reasons (including the internet) over the next 14 years. Dell rode the wave of the personal computer market (later, servers too). Michael’s genius was in combining explosive growth in a new market with an innovative business model (selling direct). He realized what Charlie Munger calls a Lollapalooza effect. The result? Dell became a massive company that grew at a torrid pace for 14 straight years. And Michael amassed a sizeable fortune, $125 billion per Bloomberg as of this writing.

The lesson learned is that markets matter a lot. A rapidly growing market is an ideal place to build a business because it usually means the number of people experiencing the problem is growing rapidly too. In that type of market, a company’s solutions don’t have to be stellar. They need to not suck. If companies can check that box, the demand from the market will yank them along. In this type of market, there’s enough business to go around, so there likely isn’t much price competition and margins and profits are healthy.

Michael Dell built, and still runs, a juggernaut of a company. Dell is a textbook example of why entrepreneurs want to start businesses in markets that are—or will be—growing rapidly.