Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 7 hours ago
Sequoia Partner Jim Goetz on the importance of solving a specific pain point for a specific customer.
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 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.”
Jim 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.”
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Stanford GSB (2008)
Sequoia Partner Jim Goetz on the importance of solving a specific pain point for a specific customer.
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 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.”
Jim 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.”
- - -
Stanford GSB (2008)
