[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting piv...
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Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
Someone on HN said Notion started as a research tool. Couldn't find
info on that online, but it got me interested in thinking about
unusual/interesting pivots. I've read about some of the big ones
(Odeo --> Twitter, Tote --> Pinterest), but curious if anyone has
more recent or lesser known ones.
Author : jd_illa
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-09-06 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
| gumby wrote:
| Cisco is a famous example. They were founded to build a clone of
| the beloved PDP-10 mainframe. To bring in some cash they made
| copies of the stanford LAN routers the team had designed and
| built at Stanford. Turns out a lot of people wanted networking
| gear.
|
| Years later some of the founders founded XKL to make a PDP-10
| clone.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Which in turn pivoted to optical networking equipment. ;)
| gumby wrote:
| Well by that point the market for PDP-10s was pretty much
| nil.
| tesseract wrote:
| Game Neverending --> Flickr
| jollybean wrote:
| Then he started another game company which became Slack!
| lucakiebel wrote:
| The guy doesn't sound like he's that good at game companies,
| still should probably continue though
| mxuribe wrote:
| Unless...This is a mind trick that he uses to trick his
| mind into thinking that *this time* I'll really develop a
| game...and then fully expecting that something else will be
| created! I mean, some other creative people resort to all
| manner of tricks - like alcohol, weed, etc. - just to
| trigger the muse and serendipitous invention!
| papreclip wrote:
| maybe he's just tricking game devs into applying their work
| ethic to other product lines
| eps wrote:
| It was called Glitch and it was _super_ dorky.
|
| But it was after their Flickr exit, so they were basically
| doing what they wanted for a while.
| killvenom wrote:
| Netscape started as a virtual conference room back in the 90s
| before they had to scale it back to just a browser.
|
| Twitch aka JustinTV, at one point the founding team tried to sell
| coffee tables with your blog post of choice printed on it.
| raldi wrote:
| Nintendo was a century-old family business making some of the
| best playing cards in Japan; when the old CEO was about to pass
| the baton to his descendent, the latter took a trip to the world
| headquarters of Bicycle, the biggest playing-card manufacturer in
| the world, and was shocked to see it was like two floors of a
| generic office building, and decided immediately to pivot the
| company into a bigger pond.
| vcryan wrote:
| paulcnichols wrote:
| Nice burn
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| I really dislike these stories because virtually all these
| companies lose the script (no second act). It seems that
| companies that start with a larger vision have multiple acts.
| Microsoft with software going from programming tools to OS to
| office to cloud. Apple with computing going from computers to
| iPods, phones, and tablets. Google with organizing the worlds
| information and making it accessible. Perhaps it is survival bias
| or perhaps I am mistaken.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure Microsoft had such a grand vision early on; they
| were late to the Internet after all. And their public cloud
| play came along later as well. Neither did Apple. And I'd say
| that Google went from organizing the world's information to
| mostly selling ads.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| I would say that Google monetized organizing the world's
| information by selling ads. That is pretty exactly what they
| did with search and search ads.
| ghaff wrote:
| Except that they largely deprioritized things besides
| search because they couldn't monetize to the same degree.
| Google Reader, Scholar, Books (and yes I know there were
| legal issues), Deja News/Groups, etc. They continue to sort
| of support things like Blogger but they're clearly not a
| priority. To Google, the "world's information" is mostly
| restricted to information they can serve search ads
| against.
| fakethenews2022 wrote:
| Agree but still a grand vision. Organizing the world's
| monetizable information and making it accessible.
|
| They added the monetizable part later.
|
| There has been other information besides the web that
| they have organized: YouTube.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't really disagree. They narrowed their vision over
| time but did start out with a grand vision.
| beeskneecaps wrote:
| Apparently Nextdoor was previously a "crowdsourced almanac of
| professional and college athletes" called Fanbase
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fanbase
|
| Pivot story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-16558
| jasode wrote:
| Brian Armstrong pivoted from "payments enabler for Bitcoin"
| (Bitbank) -- to -- "cryptocurrencies exchange" (Coinbase) :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815403
|
| In other words, he pivoted from an idea analogous to
| Visa/PayPal/Stripe/etc -- to -- a forex exchange market and
| financial broker/custodian.
|
| [To downvoters, if my information is incorrect, please add the
| correction. I linked Brian's 2012 text where he described what he
| was initially trying to create.]
| nl wrote:
| I think you are being downvoted because you pretty clearly need
| to build the exchange to make the payment thing work.
|
| They just never got to that part, so it's arguable if it's a
| pivot.
| k4ch0w wrote:
| Slack, MMO to Chat client is probably the most interesting and
| stark pivot
| dvtrn wrote:
| Slack? The chat app that everyone has very strongly held
| opinions on? _that_ slack?
|
| It started as an MMO? I never knew this and have got to go read
| about it now, that IS an interesting pivot.
| preommr wrote:
| Not even the first time that happened.
|
| Stewart Butterfield previously tried to make a game that
| eventually became flickr.
| sjg1729 wrote:
| And discord was split off from a LoL-like game when it
| turned out to be the best part about it
| pnw wrote:
| Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6O5QXj6n18
| bink wrote:
| IIRC some of the animated characters that show up with error
| messages are from the old game.
| PStamatiou wrote:
| More on that here: https://mashable.com/article/slack-glitch
|
| https://www.glitchthegame.com/
| didgetmaster wrote:
| It could depend on what is considered 'a pivot'. Some companies
| start out with grandiose plans only to find out that they don't
| have enough money or other resources to develop, market, and
| support 'Plan A'. So they take a piece of what they already have
| working and build a product around that to 'prime the pump'.
| Before they know it, the pump primer turns into 'Plan B' and they
| never get back to the original plan.
|
| I have experienced some of that with my current project. It is
| designed to be a global distributed data management system, but I
| am currently marketing it as a simple data analytics tool because
| that is the part that is working the best right now.
| https://www.Didgets.com
| hbrn wrote:
| Plaid was originally a budgeting app. After realizing how
| terrible banking APIs are, they pivoted to building a developer-
| friendly banking API. Now their valuation is 10B+.
| bot41 wrote:
| That is not that interesting. It's something everyone realizes
| when they try make a budgeting app. Plaid decided to break the
| rules to create a product. They collected end users
| authentication details and pretended to be them to scrape data
| from financial institutions.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| So what goes wrong with budgeting apps? Sounds like there would
| be a huge market for personal (or small business) finance,
| targeting traditional CPA/CFP approaches.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| My dumb guess: The people financially-conscious enough to
| budget aren't the ones willing to pay for a budgeting
| service.
| robocat wrote:
| Ahhhh, I didn't realise the VISA buyout fell through.
|
| Plaid then got a 2021 round of $425MM at a $13.4B valuation
| "according to a person familiar with the matter".
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/07/plaid-hits-13point4-billion-...
| quartz wrote:
| Segment was a wildly successful one (with a big exit). They
| started out as an education tool startup.
|
| Also Slack was a MMORPG for something like 3-4 years before they
| gave up on it and pivoted to being a chat app.
| rmason wrote:
| The Segment crew tried a couple of ideas without any success.
| Segment was an open source project that they wrote for one of
| the startup ideas and it had much more success. They weren't in
| agreement but the partners didn't have any better ideas, they
| were down to the last of their capital so they launched a
| commercial version of their open source.
|
| https://venturebeat.com/business/how-segment-survived-its-br...
| activitypea wrote:
| I believe both Slack and Discord started developing video games,
| then realized the communication tools for large video game-scale
| teams aren't good enough.
| Animats wrote:
| BOYSTOYS.COM, which ran a strip club in San Francisco, pivoted to
| manufacturing antifreeze as GlyEco.
|
| Yes, someone did a full-scale IPO for a San Francisco strip club
| during the original dot-com boom. Ticker symbol GRLZ. SEC central
| index key 0000931799, if you want to track the history of the
| company.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| In the very old days Phar Lap made a compiler. They ran out of
| room in 64K so they wrote the DOS Extender. It was a far more
| popular tool than their compiler, so they sold that, for a
| decade, from 1986 until Win95 came out with 32-bit support.
|
| They have indeed erased the original compiler from the company
| history. But the company name itself, Phar Lap, was a reference
| to the racehorse because their compiler was going to be fast.
| mkl wrote:
| 640KB, not 64. That limit was such a ridiculous pain.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory
| yen223 wrote:
| > "In the very old days Phar Lap made a compiler"
|
| Having heard of the racehorse and not the company, this
| sentence tripped me up a bit
| obayesshelton wrote:
| Slack is a great story.
|
| Basically a tool they built in-house, the company were going bust
| and they realised that the "tool" had some value and out popped
| Slack
|
| https://review.firstround.com/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Sh...
| axit wrote:
| Funny thing is this was the second time Stewart Butterfield
| tried to build a massively multiplayer game and pivoted the
| company. The first one was Flickr!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield
| imron wrote:
| Nokia used to make toilet paper and rubber boots.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nokia
| [deleted]
| qznc wrote:
| Warren Buffet turned a textile manufacturing company into a
| holding.
|
| An automatic loom manufacture got turned into one of the biggest
| automobile companies: Toyota
|
| Nokia was initially a pulp mill.
|
| Microsoft initially sold a BASIC interpreter, then a Unix, then
| MS-DOS.
| timr wrote:
| Sharp started out making mechanical pencils.
|
| Panasonic started out making lightbulb sockets.
|
| Mitsubishi started as a shipping company.
| data2data wrote:
| nl wrote:
| Nokia was originally a rubber boots manufacturer.
| bjrobz wrote:
| Air BNB
|
| Started as a tool for renting rooms in cities during conferences,
| where hosts were expected to provide no more than an air
| mattress.
|
| Pivoted to full on house renting.
|
| Chesky talks about it all here in the blitzscaling series, an
| interview series conducted by Reid Hoffman:
|
| https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo
| robocat wrote:
| Hardly a pivot. Paul Graham's write-up on their very early
| days: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-airbnbs and a pretty
| gushing wired article about how AirBnB got into ycombinator:
| https://www.wired.com/2017/02/airbnbs-surprising-path-to-y-c...
| bze12 wrote:
| that doesn't really seem like a pivot, moreso a big expansion
| of their original niche
| bjrobz wrote:
| Yea, the story is still interesting, how they chose that
| path. Highly recommend watching the link i provided.
| rparmar wrote:
| This is perhaps the best talk I've ever heard on startups,
| ever. Chesky is such a good story teller and Reid Hoffman is
| such a great interviewer. I think a lot of founders would
| benefit from watching this.
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| Firebase started as a chat widget/plugin for websites.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| Brex went from virtual reality goggles -> corporate finance saas
|
| They basically started on the billing system for their VR and
| decided to pivot to that.
| jd_illa wrote:
| wow i totally didn't know about this -- that's hilarious.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Was it googles? I thought they were building a development
| environment in VR. But I can't find any reference.
| rickyyean wrote:
| My friend Jason wrote this Tweet with 5 examples I don't think
| gets talked about much:
| https://twitter.com/JasonShen/status/1560680372463173637
|
| Most notable one was probably Grubwithus (meet people over meals)
| -> GOAT (sneakers marketplace, valued at $3.7B)
| jasonshen wrote:
| Thanks Ricky! Yeah the 5 I wrote about are:
|
| Zimride (college carpool) - Lyft Grubwithus (shared meals) -
| GOAT Meerkat (Twitter livestream) - Houseparty Fates Forever
| (iPad MOBA game) - Discord The Lobby (finance recruiting) -
| Nuvocargo
| bombcar wrote:
| If you add blank lines between you'll get them formatted more
| like what you probably want.
|
| Zimride to Lyft isn't much of a pivot, they're basically
| kinda the same thing.
| palijer wrote:
| This is a pretty decent list if you are interested in the concept
| and looking for examples.
|
| https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivo...
| jd_illa wrote:
| hah curious about soylent
| joegahona wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this -- I didn't realize this existed.
| Instagram is covered in your link, and you can hear about it
| from the founder in this really good Lex Fridman podcast:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pvpNKUPbIY
|
| These lists always kind of remind me of popular bands that
| changed music over time. The most drastic "pivot" I've ever
| come across in a known band is Ministry, who went from a benign
| new-wave Depeche Mode clone in 1983 [1] to a pseudo-Cabaret
| Voltaire in 1986 [2], then to full-on metal by 1991 [3].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VFqVRepm6U
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mui0sj-kxLY
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYYGKCanqfA
| sshine wrote:
| On this list, Nokia originally producing rubber is probably the
| funniest.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Soylent is funny - nutrition to mobile phone towers.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| Other way around
| sshine wrote:
| MtGox, the infamous Bitcoin exchange that handled over 70% of the
| Bitcoin trading volume of 2010 was originally "Magic: the
| Gathering Online Exchange", a site for trading magic cards in
| MtG: Online. I don't know if it's that wild of a pivot, trading
| one virtual object and then trading another, but magic cards sure
| seem more innocuous.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Actually Nintendo started (140 years ago!) also as card trading
| company before becoming a console giant
| tristor wrote:
| It's even more interesting than that. Nintendo was created
| shortly after Japan made it no longer illegal to manufacturer
| or play card games (seen as something from the West to be
| banned). They started creating original card and board games,
| as well as card designs. They focused on playing cards, not
| necessarily trading cards, though. The entire business was
| able to exist or started due to government regulations and a
| partial lift.
|
| Sort of unrelated, but Japanese companies have a history of
| convincing Disney to do things they'd otherwise never do.
| Nintendo famously got a license to use Disney characters on
| their playing cards in the 1950s... something nobody else was
| able to do, and it was one of their most lucrative lines.
| Square Enix managed to convince Disney to license their IP
| for use in Kingdom Hearts, which is bizarre in numerous ways
| for the Disney MO, and it turned into something incredible.
| Studio Ghibli famously managed to prevent Disney from
| destroying it's films when released in the US by pulling a
| power play (they sent a samurai sword to Harvey Weinstein...
| yes that Harvey with a note that just said "No cuts.").
| cperciva wrote:
| I thought the issue with card games wasn't that they were
| Western, but rather that they were gambling.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Didn't youtube start off as a dating website?
| trentgreene wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/16/youtube-p...
| mtmail wrote:
| Maybe you're mixing that up with Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg
| started FaceMash to compare students in a 'hot or not' type
| website.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#FaceMash
| rmason wrote:
| Nope, YouTube really did start out as a dating site where you
| could record videos. Quite simply it didn't work very well.
| They pivoted and history was made.
|
| Others had tried earlier with the same idea but the pieces
| weren't in place. Plus being members of the PayPal mafia they
| knew how to execute.
| mtmail wrote:
| I was wrong indeed. Screenshot of the dating-site
| youtube.com https://web.archive.org/web/20050428014715/http
| s://www.youtu...
| matt3210 wrote:
| Agave was originally for data crunching in construction but there
| was just no way to get the data so it became an integration
| platform for all the various software.
| ppjim wrote:
| This company pivoted 27 times before finding its current product
| market fit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W09ChyR6-DQ
| hnsanket wrote:
| Discord was probably supposed to be a gaming company but now it's
| a lot more than something related to just gaming
| bjord wrote:
| pretty sure the discord as a whole was a pivot away from a
| video game (I believe they extracted the chat feature they'd
| built for the game and ran with that)
| emptysea wrote:
| I think that's actually the Slack origin story you're
| thinking of, but honestly discord could have the same origin.
| pnw wrote:
| Slack and Discord have a lot in common. Both were the
| founders second attempt at a game company that morphed into
| a chat platform.
|
| Jason previously founded Aurora Feint, which became the
| social platform OpenFeint, acquired by Gree.
| matt3210 wrote:
| Agaveapi was originally for data crunching in construction but
| there was just no way to get the data so it became an integration
| platform for all the various construction software.
| [deleted]
| jayceedenton wrote:
| Nokia:
|
| Toilet Paper -> Rubber Boots -> Electronics
| kujin88 wrote:
| Interesting that no one mentioned Netflix, which originally
| started off as nothing more than a rentals company.
| jd_illa wrote:
| Netflix is a cool one but the transition from rentals to
| streaming feels more like a natural progression than a pivot.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| If it was so natural, a single high level executive at
| Blockbuster should've seen it coming. Accessible and cheap
| servers, exponentially increasing internet speeds, and smart
| devices all happening at once was society-altering. It seems
| obvious in retrospect but it's just tough to spot.
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