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

AHU at this point in time was really a web directory for Stanford, not much more. Many people would argue today that's a feature. Google wasn't a search engine. It was all about page rank and improving search for the search engines. Kind of a middleware offer in many ways. YouTube was about sharing video from parties with one another. The point I'm trying to make is 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. We regularly see entrepreneurs come in and talk about billion dollar markets, 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.