Vitamins and Painkillers

In 1998, Google cofounders Larry and Sergey rented a home garage in Palo Alto from Dennis Troper and his wife Susan, who worked in marketing at Intel. 

Susan started using the new tenants’ search engine for research associated with her job, and she loved it. Then one day the server in the garage went down, she had no access to the search engine, and she panicked about not being able to do her job properly that day. 

 Apparently that was the moment that made her realize how important Google might be – if the free search engine was so valuable that she felt like she couldn’t do her work without it, well, that’s a powerful thing. So she quit her job and joined the new company in the garage. She’s now worth a zillion dollars. 

Here’s the point of this story: Most great startups begin with a founder who notices a problem worth solving. But some problems are small things that people won’t pay that much to have solved. Other things are big problems. Sometimes I use the analogy of vitamins and painkillers – people won’t pay that much for vitamins, but if you’re in pain then you’ll pay a lot of money for painkillers. 

Susan Wojcicki realized that day in 1998 that if the search engine in her garage made her work so much more efficient that she couldn’t be productive without it, then that’s a pretty powerful thing.

So if you are an entrepreneur or innovator looking to build a solution to a problem, think about whether your solution is a vitamin or a painkiller.

Given a choice between the two, the painkiller always wins.