
Startup Pivots - marco1
https://github.com/delight-im/Knowledge/blob/68b79f8c204defea42c0fc34aa31596b221e73fc/Startups.md
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DoreenMichele
There's a military saying that "No battle plan survives contact with the
enemy." Business seems to generally be the same.

You try a thing, learn that it doesn't work the way you envisioned and you
modify it accordingly, informed by new info. If you do that well, the result
is a functioning business.

~~~
xmprt
I've also heard something along the lines of "a plan is useless but planning
is invaluable."

~~~
bananamerica
Improvising on top of a plan is much better than coming up with things on the
spot.

Some creators achieved great success working like that, such as Fernando
Meirelles, Larry David, and Woody Allen.

I'm much more of a planner myself - like Spielberg and Hitchcock. Not that I'm
even close to them, of course. But I admire their method. It is not uncommon
for most things to occur precisely as planned, sometimes to the second. But
you gotta be prepared to think on your feet. I think that's the message behind
those sayings.

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georgewsinger
Brilliant Ideas, Not Pivots:

[https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-
plan-j...](https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-
between-you-and-me)

~~~
marco1
This is great. We also need companies and founders with great visions that
ultimately _don’t_ have to pivot. And I’m sure there are many of them.

By the way, is there any source for that blog post that proves its existence
and form back to 2006? The Wayback Machine only has it until 2016, but perhaps
the URL changed.

~~~
wlesieutre
It does trace back to 2006, although the "Elon Musk, Co-Founder & CEO of Tesla
Motors" byline is misleading. The original publication has him as Chairman of
the Board. It gives his year appropriate job description in the intro
paragraph so I'll let the blog engine's retroactive job title change slide.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20061114160549/http://www.teslamo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20061114160549/http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/?p=8)

(Their website used to be at teslamotors.com)

~~~
marco1
Thanks a lot for tracking that down! I would also say the change of some
metadata in a non-static page is fine.

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guelo
What struck me about this list is how old these companies are. It's sad
because that web gold rush seems to be over. Do the lessons from that
generation of startups apply to the much more consolidated web of today?

Instagram 2010, Whatsapp 2009, Groupon 2008, Twitter 2006, Youtube 2005,
Facebook 2004.

~~~
nugget
Me in 2001 (dot com crash): "the web gold rush seems to be over"

Me in 2007 (market malaise): "the web gold rush seems to be over"

Me in 2012 (Facebook IPO): "the web gold rush seems to be over"

Me in 2019 (finally having learned my lesson): there are probably still plenty
of opportunities left, if you know where to look

~~~
guelo
Past performance is not indicative of future results.

~~~
icebraining
Exactly - neither positive _nor negative_.

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dr_dshiv
Flickr beginning as "game never ending".. Slack beginning as the game
"glitch", both magical failures of Stewart Butterfield.

~~~
benzible
The full evolution of Flickr from [https://businessideaslab.com/flickr-
history/](https://businessideaslab.com/flickr-history/)

 _> A project founded in 2004 by Vancouver-based company Ludicorp (coming from
the Latin word for ‘play’ actually), Flickr, as we know it today, is nothing
like it was supposed to be in the very beginning. In reality, this website was
made out to be a kind of a multiplayer online game, which eventually was
turned into a chat system with live photo-sharing options. While the team
behind Flickr, namely the couple Steward Butterfield and Caterina Fake, was
working on quite a big number of settings and possibilities for the project,
they ultimately got rid of the coding system for the game and created what is
currently viewed as the beginning of Flickr. Later, even the chat system
called Flickr Live, which was the basis of the earlier versions of the site
was erased since the entire character of the portal has transformed into
something a lot more different than the planned too. Also, we must never
forget that, just like languages and cooking, the internet is something ever
changing and there is nothing still inside the World Wide Web. Every site is
what the users want it to be, the users of Flickr didn’t want to chat – they
wanted to share their experiences in pictures and not in instant messages._

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michaelbuckbee
The term "pivot" has been so overused as to be a joke. These are typically
much more like "focusing" or "refining" of their original premise.

These services almost all had a handful of features to start and then found
through use that they had a bunch of lackluster features and one killer one
(Burbn -> Instagram) is a good example.

~~~
marco1
Well, would you say that the _pivot_ from a dating app to what YouTube is
today is a joke? Is that just a refined product? Same for games turning into
social networks or productivity tools.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
It's not the action itself just the impreciseness of the label that I'm
objecting to as I do think there is a difference between a video dating app
that re-uses their underlying technology to become a general video hosting
service (a refinement) vs say a Magic the Gathering collectors site that
becomes a cryptocurrency exchange or a product company that just cancels their
product and rebrands as a consultancy.

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choiway
There's survivorship bias here. Where's the list of companies that pivoted to
oblivion?

~~~
gwbas1c
I worked with a guy who wanted to pivot every week, then every month.

Basically, he just didn't have enough follow through on specific ideas to
either validate or disprove them.

I should have walked away sooner than I did, because we went nowhere.

In general, a pivot needs to come from evidence that it will increase sales,
and stay within your core competency.

~~~
drspacemonkey
I had a similar experience. I joined a company about a month before Google
launched a competing advertising product (you know, the kind of product Google
never kills). The CEO got stuck in some sort of pivot loop where we'd
drastically change our product offering every 6 months.

The CEO insisted it wasn't pivoting, it was "refinement", but he also had a
really annoying tendency to redefine X to mean "what we do", so he could tell
clients and investors "we do X".

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xwowsersx
Is there a lesson to be derived here or is it just to point out that
oftentimes the thing that gains traction in the end isn't what they were
originally working on? If there is a lesson, what would it be? Just work on
_anything_ to get your head in the game and into the mindset of solving
problems? I can see how people overvalue the original idea, but it matters to
_some_ degree, no?

~~~
marco1
Sure, there are lessons here. And it’s certainly not “just work on _anything_
”. It’s really that the initial idea is often overvalued, as you already said,
that execution is more important than ideas, that you should constantly
(re)validate your idea, and that you should be ready to pivot.

We know this from “The Lean Startup”, but practical examples can show why some
aspects are important. And it’s not just small teams and solo founders from
startups and young companies that may place too much importance on a great
initial idea. It’s _certainly_ also the general public, where most people
belief that successful startups are the result of a genius having a clever
idea. See basically every movie about inventions (and young companies). That
general public also includes a lot of (potential) investors.

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elicash
I'm not sure how the lesson (if any is intended) applies to some of these.

For example, YouTube started as a dating site. I genuinely don't know enough
about the history of the website: is it that they had a decent dating website
going that had videos as a feature, but talking to their users and studying
the analytics they saw the video feature taking off and decide to revamp
accordingly? Or did the dating part just fail, and the choice was to pivot to
something else in their wheelhouse or risk losing investors? I genuinely don't
know.

My sense of Twitter and some others is that it was the former. But for
companies in the latter category, the lesson maybe it just "don't give up"
rather than lean startup principles.

~~~
marco1
For YouTube and Groupon at least, it definitely was the latter. This can be
seen in the sources.

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aj7
Spectra-Physics, the first laser company to exceed $100M in sales and get a
major stock listing, began as a semiconductor stepper company. They pivoted to
making HeNe lasers.

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the_arun
A meticulous plan needs ton of effort & assumes dependencies. How well we
perform in "Guerilla tactics"is what makes us (humans) different from super
computers.

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gumby
The most famous example is probably Cisco, which was founded to build a clone
of the PDP-10 small mainframe computer. To make some money they sold routers
on a design they had developed for the Stanford network.

But was it a pivot? The founders later went and started a company XKL doing
just what they had originally intended to do: PDP-10 clones.

~~~
saagarjha
And XKL now seems to make switches, so I guess they've come full circle.

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aosmith
Was there ever a pizza place in the 600 West building? All I remember in the
sandwich place (Snarf's?)

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jonplackett
Interesting but was hoping there would be more than the famous ones.

Would also be interested in a list of Super successful startups that started
exactly as they were and didn’t have to do a massive pivot.

