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Sequoia Partner Jim Goetz on the importance of solving a specific pain point for a specific customer

November 17, 2023

Yahoo started out as a web directory for Stanford

Google didn’t start out as a search engine. It was all about PageRank and improving search for search engines—kind of a middleware offering in many ways.

YouTube was for sharing videos from parties.

Apple was going after the hobby computer market.

“When you think about these three companies, you could have made all sorts of arguments about market size not being large enough—feature rather than a product. But in all cases, there’s a great deal of passion and energy around a specific pain point. They started very small.”

He continues:

“The point I’m trying to make with this is that we regularly see entrepreneurs come in and talk about billion dollar markets and large TAMs. And that’s just not as interesting to us as the passion that comes from trying to solve a very specific pain point for a very specific customer. Focus. Focus. Focus.”