The first one, "What do you do?", should potentially be renamed "What do you do for your customers?". It took me a while to realize the importance of the distinction when pitching.
Using the Google example from the article, the bad one answers "What does Google do?" and the good one answers "What does Google do for its customers?".
I would even refine this down more to "What do you do for your profitable customers?". Using google the answer would be "We bring targeted and motivated leads to your website".
At Google's early stage, would that have brought investment? At the time they would not have had distribution/market penetration, which is what the search engine does for them.
When Google started they didn’t really have a plan for how they were going to make money or get customers (as apposed to users)[1]. This is fine, but just be aware of this when you pitch investors. If you don’t have a plan for how you are going to make money be explicit about it.
1. Personally I doubt that Google was that clueless early on as how to make money. A better search engine is inherently valuable because of the ability to direct traffic flow to favoured sites.
I am not sure where I said users don’t matter, but users are not customers. Google sells users to their customers the advertisers so of course users are important to Google. If happy users gets you more customers then creating happy users is a good strategy.
Using the Google example from the article, the bad one answers "What does Google do?" and the good one answers "What does Google do for its customers?".