[HN Gopher] Companies that had successful pivots
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Companies that had successful pivots
Author : karimf
Score : 302 points
Date : 2021-12-31 09:36 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| the-dude wrote:
| Acorn to ARM.
| ninechars wrote:
| Holy crap I had no idea! We had an Acorn in my primary school
| back in the stone age.
| karimf wrote:
| Added ARM to the list. Thanks!
| mattbee wrote:
| Pivot is a bittersweet description, and ARM was a new spin-off
| founded in 1990 alongside Apple. Acorn renamed itself to
| Element 14 Ltd in 1998 and sold off the assets from their home
| computer business. They built DSL kit for a couple of years
| before ending up as part of Broadcom.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_14_(company)
| easrng wrote:
| Didn't Element 14 manufacture Raspberry Pis at some point?
| the-dude wrote:
| What is interesting too is that none of the other
| microcomputer manufacturers of the time tried to create their
| own CPU.
|
| We have IBM + the rest of the mainframe guys and Sun.
| mattbee wrote:
| Not that it helped Acorn survive, of course! Right up until
| the end, RISC OS ran on interrupts, too much delicate
| kernel code, cooperative multitasking, and unprotected
| memory.
|
| They weren't the only CPU pioneers; Argonaut didn't think
| it unreasonable to create a custom CPU to push polygons on
| a Nintendo cartridge -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX
| the-dude wrote:
| The Super_FX seems to be a coprocessor. More companies
| created silicon ( Commodore? ), but not CPUs AFAIK.
| mattbee wrote:
| It was a whole new RISC CPU. Lots of co-processors are
| whole CPUs. Argonaut spun a company off, and it's still
| shipping - the inventor said it outsold ARM and MIPS
| before the PS1 (from https://web.archive.org/web/20071217
| 092221/http://www.armcha... )
| zbuf wrote:
| We can add this to the debate above about whether Netflix was
| really a pivot. Acorn made computers and eventually decided
| they needed their own processor. I'm sure one could debate
| whether that was evolution or revolution, but what we know for
| sure is that Acorn is not around today and ARM (the spin-off)
| is.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| There are a few of these that don't really feel like pivots to
| me. For example Netflix changing from delivering things via DVD
| to doing it by streaming just feels like evolving to suit the
| market. Would we consider a publisher as pivoting because they
| now sell ebooks and run news websites instead of printing books
| and magazines?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Does anyone else think a new blu/dvd shipping company could
| work well again with same day shipping assuming the continued
| fragmentation gets worse and worse?
| maneesh wrote:
| Netflix still runs a dvd rental business, with a much higher
| offering of titles (less content restriction than with
| streaming)
| Jensson wrote:
| They pivoted from having a bunch of people managing mailing
| DVD's to people to having a bunch of people managing computer
| servers. It is really different and there is no reason to
| assume they would succeed at that, if they built a subpar
| service they would have lost.
| jrh206 wrote:
| I certainly view Netflix as a pivot. The things the company has
| to do, day to day, are just drastically different.
| deltree7 wrote:
| So does Amazon, Apple, IBM and hundreds of other companies
| davnicwil wrote:
| Wasn't the streaming delivery piece intended from the start
| though, but they just had to wait for the infrastructure to
| support it so did DVD delivery as a stopgap? I had always
| assumed this was the case.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| the "Net" in netflix was: you could order on the net, only
| the delivering changed.
| Beldin wrote:
| Yes, it hinges on the definition of pivot. From a customer
| point of view, this is a mere evolution. That this imposes
| vastly different requirements on the underlying business is
| not really the problem of the customer.
|
| In a similar vein, how would you describe the move of just
| about every primary, secondary and tertiary educational
| institutions to online teaching?
|
| I don't consider that a pivot. It was necessary to continue
| to deliver the basic added value of these institutions.
| However, that did require a whole slew of new skills from
| teachers. So sure, YMMV.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| In one respect, this "pivot" is simply changing the medium for
| delivery of the service. On the other hand, this represents a
| major shift in the structure of the company, introducing change
| in basically every department. It seems very naive to presume
| this shift would be simply an adjustment of the business
| structure. I would guess the Netflix business as we know it now
| would have very little resemblance of what it was during those
| DVD days.
| [deleted]
| astura wrote:
| The real pivot was going from DVD distribution to movie and tv
| show production. This, of course, only happened because the
| switch to streaming made it so that Netflix were dependent on
| content producers. Netflix knew content producers would just
| create their own streaming service in time and they'd lose all
| their leverage.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| Basically is converting from being Blockbuster to being HBO.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix, once said,
| "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us" I
| worked for HBO when he said that, and took it very
| seriously.
| rkk3 wrote:
| > There are a few of these that don't really feel like pivots
| to me. For example Netflix changing from delivering things via
| DVD to doing it by streaming just feels like evolving to suit
| the market.
|
| Reed Hastings allegedly barred the delivery team executives
| from his leadership meetings when they were _responsible for
| 100% of the companies revenue_. It was a massive, legendary
| pivot.
|
| Pivots are nothing else but evolving to suit the market, at the
| cost of an established existing business or use case.
|
| > Would we consider a publisher as pivoting because they now
| sell ebooks and run news websites instead of printing books and
| magazines?
|
| I don't see why not, except that their legacy/core businesses
| are still or until recently responsible for the majority of
| their revenue [1]. I think there is a difference between adding
| a new distribution channel and altering the fundamentals of the
| business. The pivot for publishers has been more from ads ->
| subs.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/business/media/nyt-
| earnin...
| jasode wrote:
| _> There are a few of these that don't really feel like pivots
| to me._
|
| Because no authority dictates the meaning of "pivot", it looks
| like the concept diverged and became wider:
|
| - "pivot" as switching from a _unprofitable or failed business
| idea_ to a profitable one. A "phoenix rising from the ashes"
| type of pivot often associated with startups that finally
| figured out the elusive "Product Market Fit" instead of
| shutting down. This seems to be the original meaning
| popularized in 2011 by Eric Ries "Lean Startup" book :
| https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous...
|
| - "pivot" as any change in business focus whether the previous
| one was profitable or not.
| rexf wrote:
| That's a good point. I thought pivot meant "switching from a
| unprofitable or failed business idea to a profitable one".
|
| In that sense, IIRC Netflix's founder had the early vision to
| offer streaming services (one day in the future), so it
| wasn't a pivot. It was part of the plan.
|
| I mean he named his company "Netflix". Does that sound like
| DVD delivery? No, it sounds like inter(net) + flicks.
| Retric wrote:
| Netflix went from legal access to any DVD produced, too needing
| content deals with the entertainment industry and making their
| own content. The technical difficulties are minor by
| comparison.
|
| That's generally what pivoting means, going from chemical to
| digital cameras for example is a similarly huge jump even if
| the customers largely stay the same you lost a huge revenue
| stream from selling and or processing film and now need to
| spend a lot more on R&D.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| The content delivery aspect that Netflix coordinated with
| ISP's was a pretty phenomenal technical feat, and could be
| seen as a pivot into networking at scale.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Changing from film cameras to digital ones is exactly the
| sort of thing I wouldn't call a pivot. Many of the components
| and skills are identical, but you are adding sensors and
| storage. That's just the sort of adaption to an evolving
| market that any reasonable company should do.
|
| A pivot suggests a sudden and radical change in course. Slack
| feels like one, companies that have switched from
| manufacturing to (apparently unrelated) software feel even
| more so.
|
| I'd also say Nokia doesn't feel like a pivot. They were a
| company that did anything internally for which they did not
| find adequate solutions on the market. They produced a lot of
| different things over the decades and the radio business is
| one that found external success and grew over time. Do we
| consider large conglomerates to have repeatedly pivoted as
| different portions of their business waxed and waned?
| Retric wrote:
| A pivot is mostly a question of abandoning the old model
| efficiently rather than simply starting to do something
| else. Kodak was mostly a chemical company, selling film
| every week and a new camera every decade.
|
| Going from manufacturing pencils to building aircraft
| doesn't make use of existing workforce, equipment, or
| customers so why not just expand into a new industry and
| keep the old one as long as it was possible? Netflix or
| digital cameras on the other hand eats into their customer
| base. Someone buying a digital cameras is no longer buying
| film from you, it's a destructive transition.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| You're still selling movies and cameras.
|
| If we take this approach EVERYBODY has pivoted. Walmart
| has online sales that are "eating into" their in store
| sales. CVS has home delivery, eating into their foot
| traffic...
| Retric wrote:
| Kodak actually pivoted to making pharmaceuticals. That
| leveraged what they where actually good at, high
| precision chemical manufacturing.
|
| Survivorship bias means you see a lot of company's that
| have successfully pivoted, and the brands that failed
| often get bought up after the fact.
| Jensson wrote:
| > You're still selling movies and cameras.
|
| That doesn't matter, the organization is the people in
| it, if you have to make huge reorganizations in what the
| people at your company do then that is a huge pivot that
| is dangerous and likely to fail. Digital companies are
| not like other companies, you are thinking of companies
| where brands is the main thing and you can just slap
| together a new product in a year. It doesn't work like
| that in normal businesses, Kodak couldn't just say that
| all their factories specialized on making goods related
| to old cameras be repurposed to digital cameras.
|
| Some of the expertise can transfer over, but if that is
| not your competitive advantage it doesn't matter. Kodaks
| competitive advantage was not camera lenses etc, so they
| had no way to pivot to digital cameras. Digital cameras
| destroyed the business they were good at.
|
| > If we take this approach EVERYBODY has pivoted. Walmart
| has online sales that are "eating into" their in store
| sales. CVS has home delivery, eating into their foot
| traffic...
|
| No, not everybody has pivoted. Lots of companies failed
| to pivot and died. Walmart is aware of this and has
| started to build expertise around digital sales already,
| because Walmart doesn't want to die in case digital sales
| overtakes physical sales.
| vidarh wrote:
| I think Netflix is more of an argument than Kodak.
| Netflix kept selling access to movies, though the way
| they did so changed dramatically.
|
| But while Kodak did sell cameras, Kodak sold cameras
| mostly to drive sales of their film. The film and
| chemicals were their high margin product ranges.
|
| The pivot to try to drive their earnings mainly from
| their cameras was a fundamental change of business model
| in a way that Netflix shift to streaming (or Walmart or
| CVS online and delivery) wasn't. It turned a long term
| recurring high-margin revenue stream into a punctuated
| low-margin revenue stream. (not that they could have
| prevented the eventual collapse of their film business)
| PeterisP wrote:
| The key pivot was not changing from film _cameras_ to
| digital _cameras_ , where indeed many components and skills
| are identical, but from film business (the majority of
| which is/was film and development
| process/chemistry/equipment/services, not cameras) to a
| camera-only business. Some companies did that pivot, some
| (like Kodak) did not.
| bluGill wrote:
| Kodak was never known for good cameras. That was cannon
| and Nikon who both pivoted to digital. Kodak made great
| film and didn't have a simple pivot in pictures. Their
| simple pivot was pharmaceuticals which as others noted
| they did do.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Nokia climbed up the value chain in their vertical. From
| telephone cable into PCM line concentrators. From those
| into small exchanges. Then to the DX-200 digital telephone
| exchange. They merged/bought Televa (small exchanges and
| Gen0 Cellphones) and bought out Salora from Mobira (Gen0
| cellphones and commercial radios). When Gen1 NMT became a
| thing they started making phones for it and later
| basestations. With GSM (Gen2) they ware making basestations
| and handsets from day one.
|
| And they still make basestations and exchanges to this day.
| So they kainda are at their roots.
| mtgx wrote:
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "The technical difficulties are minor by comparison."
|
| You mean serving video to a pc? Because I also think about
| the infrastructure/last mile. And it's one thing to have
| 10000 customers and quite another to have 10000000 (or
| whatever #)
| hk1337 wrote:
| Didn't they still need to workout deals or licenses with the
| entertainment industry to rent out the DVDs? Didn't
| Blockbuster have to do that to provide VHS and DVDs in the
| store?
|
| I still think it was a pivot but not for that reason.
| Evolving can still be pivoting. Netflix shifted their
| business from providing physical media to streaming media.
| astura wrote:
| No, definitely not, in the US anyone can rent out any
| physical media legally without any permission from the
| anyone due to the first sale doctrine. Same as me freely
| selling or loaning my DVDs and books without asking anyone
| first.
|
| Before Blockbuster/Hollywood Video came to my town there
| were dozens of the video rental stores, all of which were
| mom-and-pop operations.
|
| Nintendo tried to stop video game rentals during the NES
| era but failed - there was legislation banning video game
| rentals that was not passed and then they sued blockbuster
| for making photocopies of their manuals. I think I remember
| reading that rental stores having to send multiple
| employees into multiple stores to purchase Nintendo games
| because Nintendo had an agreement with retailers not to
| sell multiple copies of the same game to a single person to
| discourage rental and reseller purchases.
| Beldin wrote:
| Not quite accurate. If you become a distributor of
| content, then you fall under the rules for distributors.
|
| That's (part of) why videos typically had that "not for
| rent" / "only for home viewing" stuff. There's a
| difference between you lending or renting out a dvd once,
| versus this being a business model.
|
| How this works out exactly in a US legal context, you
| ask? Well: always follow legal advice from strangers on
| the Internet. Also IANAL.
| bluGill wrote:
| While legally you are correct, you want to make deals
| anyway, if you do you can get plenty of DVDs in on
| release day (they might sit in your backroom for a few
| days to ensure it was shipped fast enough). There are
| other things you can get in a deal if you make one.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| See also: compulsory licensing for music. You don't
| _need_ the permission of the copyright holder, but
| licensing deals are usually cheaper than the rate set by
| law.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_S
| tat...
| wbl wrote:
| Netflix still runs the DVD service.
| [deleted]
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| But it's obviously a lesser degree of pivot than a pivot that
| discards your current customer base. I also wouldn't be
| surprised if being a huge buyer of wholesale DVDs got them
| good contacts in the media/film industry.
|
| Also, the transition from film to digital was more gradual
| than it appears, as many features now thought of as digital-
| only were actually available on late generation film cameras.
| cutenewt wrote:
| I'd agree that if you're 1) delivering the same promise to
| the 2) same customer base -- yes, it isn't as big of a
| pivot and some of the other companies on the list.
| orblivion wrote:
| Looks like you can still rent DVDs from Netflix
| https://dvd.netflix.com/Movies
| axiomdata316 wrote:
| Wow thanks for sharing this. I know I'm weird but I think I
| would still rather get DVDs because you have such a wider
| selection. And you can get very unique and hard to find
| movies. You're not locked into licensing deals between large
| movie studios.
| [deleted]
| cromulent wrote:
| Yeah, I would agree. Keeping up with the times and the market
| is different to pivoting, as is diversifying and monetising.
| Did Disney "pivot" from hand-made animations to theme parks and
| digital streaming? More of an evolution, I think.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah... does every new technology change mean a pivot? Or
| evolution of business strategy?
|
| If Netflix counts as a pivot, I feel like every company more
| than a few decades old should be on the list. IBM for sure,
| car companies because they now sell electric cars, banks
| because they now offer online services...
| maneesh wrote:
| I agree that Netflix moving from dvds to streaming could be
| argued as an evolution instead of a pivot, but I would
| argue that moving from streaming and delivering others'
| content to producing their own content was a very
| significant shift worthy of being called a pivot.
| zalebz wrote:
| There is a great podcast called Land of the Giants and they
| have a "season" about Netflix (as well as Amazon, Google,
| Apple); based on the information I learned there I would
| certainly say it was a risky pivot.
| thraxil wrote:
| I actually think Netflix's move towards producing their own
| shows and movies was more of a "pivot" than going from DVD to
| online streaming (which I don't see as really any different
| than Blockbuster going from renting VHS to DVDs).
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Yes, I'd agree with that.
| ur-whale wrote:
| To be fair, Netflix's DVD via email business model was very
| successful before they pivoted to streaming while many of the
| others initial idea was ... <hrm>
|
| In the case of Netflix, here goes a company that smartly and
| efficiently adapted to changing market conditions rather than
| "pivoting".
| k__ wrote:
| In 2006, I even knew people here in Germany who were "renting
| mailorder DVDs from the US".
|
| It dawned to me a few years ago that this service was Netflix,
| before they went streaming.
| perlpimp wrote:
| This promotes thinking in terms of survivorship bias IMO.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Valve: They used to make games, now they make money.
| huffmsa wrote:
| With a brief foray into the hat making business in-between
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This was really interesting, a lot of these I never knew about,
| like Segment was originally pitched to YC as a classroom tool.
|
| Related, though, perhaps it's just a bit of semantics, but in
| general, I consider a "pivot" to be where a company hasn't found
| traction with their current product, so unless they switch
| they're going to die.
|
| Like another commenter who mentioned Netflix, that feels very
| different than some of these companies that were just evolving or
| growing with the market. I mean, in one sense, since technology
| is always changing you _better_ evolve at some point or you 're
| guaranteed to die. Moving from DVDs by mail to streaming was a
| pretty obvious switch, and not something that really took Netflix
| by surprise (though they famously had some major hiccups as they
| tried to make that switch).
|
| In general, though, lots of interesting and cool stories here!
| delgaudm wrote:
| Foursquare comes to mind. They were the "location check-in app"
| hotness for a while. They abandoned the app and now are a
| significant player in the surveillance ^H^H^H "location-based
| experiences" space.
| rubayeet wrote:
| I am not sure Shopify belongs to the list. It didn't exactly
| pivot, Tobi Lutke made a website with Rails to sell snowboards,
| and realized there is an untapped market for SaaS e-commerce
| product, so he generalized the framework powering the website.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| I find this to be one of the most interesting kinds of pivots -
| the original business idea wasn't good enough, but along the
| way they encountered problems with no good solution, and were
| savvy enough to go to market with that solution once they came
| up with it.
| puyoxyz wrote:
| Same applies to Slack then
| reed1234 wrote:
| How's that not a pivot?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Well, does Toni still sell snowboards?
| raldi wrote:
| MP3.com was initially a search engine.
|
| The nice thing about running a search engine, even if it only
| ever gets a trickle of traffic and could never compete with the
| big players, is that you can look at the logs and spot trends
| early. The founder noticed people were searching for something
| called "mp3", saw the domain was available, bought it, and then
| looked up what it was and eventually rebuilt the company around
| it.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| Intel- memory to microprocessors?
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I run a small business, and know others who do the same.
| Honestly, I think pivoting is the norm rather than the exception.
|
| Many of the people I know started in a similar place, but their
| businesses evolved into all kinds of weird and wacky enterprises.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| k__ wrote:
| This.
|
| I had a client who once sold anti-virus software and even
| ZetaOS.
|
| Somehow they pivoted to selling mobile speakers and toys.
| calmlynarczyk wrote:
| It really begs the question "what is a company?" if one can
| shift between such disparate markets. Surely mission doesn't
| define a company then. Perhaps ability to accumulate capital
| for a means?
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I also run a small business and I agree with this. I think it
| becomes more notable when you have to change the heading on a
| large company and all its bureaucracy.
| calmoo wrote:
| An example that is missing is MongoDB.
| 0dayz wrote:
| That list I think is a good lesson/motivator that the "golden"
| product youre developing may not become the product defining your
| company but instead a side project.
| ehnto wrote:
| Makes you wonder what you are actually building then, if it
| wasn't the product that ended up making you succesful.
|
| I notice a few of these stories involve stumbling on an itch
| that badly needed scratching while doing something else with as
| much purpose. One of the big challenges of entrepreneurship in
| software is finding a problem worth working on when you're not
| actually experiencing any problems that aren't software
| related.
|
| In that sense, perhaps you're building up experience in a new
| industry when building an idea, which introduces you to new
| problems, sometimes better problems.
| ng55QPSK wrote:
| Nokia is incorrect (afiu the tire/rubber business was span-off
| some years ago Nokian), even the source cites it better "The
| company has operated in various industries over the past 150
| years. It was founded as a pulp mill and had long been associated
| with rubber and cables, but since the 1990s has focused on large-
| scale telecommunications infrastructure, technology development,
| and licensing."
| silisili wrote:
| Yeah the source sentence is awfully vague to the point of
| confusing. Nokia was a paper mill, and their own website says
| as much in less ambiguous terms - https://www.nokia.com/about-
| us/company/our-history/
| justicezyx wrote:
| I think at least for me, before working at an early start-up, the
| wrong idea is that pivots are exceptional.
|
| No, pivots are what startup do.
|
| They are Bron out of pivots, because the founders could not find
| a way to implement their ideas in other venues.
|
| So all startups pivots, and all successful had pivoted
| successfully.
| taspeotis wrote:
| > The company then decided that the market for cameras was not
| large enough for its goals
|
| Such a Cave Johnson move.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Google: Don't be evil
| ARothfusz wrote:
| There's always Wrigley's that went from offering gum as an
| incentive to buy soap to just selling the gum... "Make something
| people want"
|
| > In 1891, 29-year-old William Wrigley Jr. (1861-1932) came to
| Chicago from Philadelphia with $32 and the idea to start a
| business selling Wrigley's Scouring Soap.[14] Wrigley offered
| premiums as an incentive to buy his soap, such as baking powder.
| Later in his career, he switched to the baking powder business,
| in which he began offering two packages of chewing gum for each
| purchase of a can of baking powder. The popular premium, chewing
| gum, began to seem more promising, prompting another switch in
| product focus. Wrigley also became the majority owner of the
| Chicago Cubs in 1921.
|
| -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrigley_Company
| productceo wrote:
| Love the list. Thanks for putting it together.
| peter303 wrote:
| MicroSoft's first products were programming languages for PCs.
| BASIC for the Altair in 1975.
| philmcp wrote:
| Very nice, never too late to pivot
|
| p.s. you could also add FanDuel to the list
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanDuel#History
| lowdose wrote:
| I didn't see TomTom in the list. After Google stole Maps TomTom
| successfully pivoted to health.
| raldi wrote:
| My favorite part of the Nintendo story is that back when it was a
| playing card company, the heir to the family business took a trip
| to America that included a meeting at the largest card company in
| the world.
|
| He had expected it to have a luxurious, palatial campus... but
| its entire headquarters turned out to be like the fourth floor of
| a single building in a generic office park. He was like, "This is
| the absolute pinnacle I can ever hope for if I succeed beyond my
| wildest dreams running the playing-card company. I need a new
| idea."
|
| You can read all about it in an outstanding book called I Am
| Error that, beyond extensive interviews with the historic key
| players, also takes an incredibly deep dive into the technical
| details.
| [deleted]
| lqet wrote:
| Now their headquarters are _7_ floors in a generic office park
| building! The new strategy turned out to be successful I guess
| :)
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Ni...
| robmiller wrote:
| I worked on the design of their US HQ in Redmond. Despite
| anything the architect could dream up, they like the metaphor
| of the cube...
| Jensson wrote:
| They aren't the top gaming company though. Tencent has some
| pretty big offices. Point is that they didn't want to be in a
| market where the top is that low, then you have to be the
| best to get a decent size, in computer gaming you can be one
| of many and still be much bigger.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Tencent_.
| ..
| eganist wrote:
| In fairness, they're probably the best vertically
| integrated family friendly electronic gaming company, and
| so long as they don't goof in that specific vertical,
| they've probably got a lock on it for a while.
|
| At least until Disney truly decides to venture into
| hardware.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Is Tencent really a gaming company? I suspect the revenue
| they get from all of their gaming ventures combined would
| be a drop in the ocean compared to WeChat.
| [deleted]
| raldi wrote:
| Looks better if you zoom out a little: https://i.imgur.com/UY
| UpUDT_d.webp?maxwidth=1200&fidelity=hi...
| froh wrote:
| Wait, "seven floors of an office park building" are all
| seven floors of this depicted building, lol...
| baron816 wrote:
| How about The Pokemon Company's headquarters: https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/The_Pok%C3%A9mon_Company#/medi... (fyi they
| don't take up the whole building).
|
| That actually is a playing card company.
| k__ wrote:
| The Wizards of the Coast are quite a big company too.
| Belphemur wrote:
| Wizard of the coast is mostly a publishing company. I think
| the playing cards came later.
| Illniyar wrote:
| Actually they originally hit it big with Magic the
| Gathering. They bought D&D and the rest much later.
|
| I'm pretty sure Magic the Gathering is still the largest
| moneymaker for them even now.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Yeah Magic the Gathering is precisely the playing card
| moneymaker that would have fit Nintendo's aspirations.
| cortesoft wrote:
| They bought TSR, who made D&D
| city41 wrote:
| I also enjoyed all the failed endeavors they tried such as
| rice, love hotels, a taxi service, and several others. They
| were truly just throwing things at the wall for a while.
|
| https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Instant_rice
|
| https://didyouknowgaming.com/post/623464734830788608/did-you...
|
| https://nintendowire.com/features/happy-valentines-day-did-y...
| christophilus wrote:
| Woah. I hadn't heard of the foray into love hotels! That's
| pretty wild.
| gxespino wrote:
| Anyone else annoyed that the way this table is laid out the pivot
| comes first before original idea. My brain doesn't work this
| way...
| robotkad wrote:
| Fun to think that games spun out fickr and slack. I wish we saw
| more kids looking up to Fake and Butterfield rather than say,
| Musk.
| astura wrote:
| Mentions Western Union but no mention of American Express
| (express mail -> financial services)? Western Union hardly even
| counts as a pivot because their original money wiring service
| operated entirely through their telegraph network, which is where
| the term "wiring" came from.
| lebuffon wrote:
| Here is more background about the nature of the pivots at WU.
|
| WU had already pivoted once in the 1970s to become a satellite
| communication company being one of the first companies to have
| five birds in orbit. (Westar series)
|
| Sometime around 1980(?) things were so bad they went into
| chapter 11, bankruptcy protection. At a senior executive
| meeting the reports were all bad. A guy named Art Tarini spoke
| up and said "What about money transfer? Can't we do something
| with that?" The reply was something like "Art if you think you
| can help give it a try"
|
| Art setup a call centre and had a small sales force to sign up
| agents in small stores in the north east side of the USA as
| money transfer locations and created paper forms to record the
| transaction details. All agent transactions were sent over the
| telephone.
|
| They were scheduled to be in bankruptcy court at the end of the
| year, but the new money transfer business was making so much
| money they cancelled it.
|
| Told to me by Art Tarini in 2001. (Paraphrased from memory)
|
| Later on (1990?) a computer terminal was created with Turbo C,
| communicating over modems to a back office system. In 1989 when
| US law changed to allowed transfers to other countries somebody
| asked "I wonder if Mexicans in the USA would want to send money
| home?" A new platform was created to handle foreign exchange
| and the rest is history.
|
| Telegraph service was shutdown in 2006. It was still doing
| ~$10M per year in revenue then. Money transfers were about $4B.
| dsiroker wrote:
| While this is helpful, just looking at _successful_ pivots
| suffers from survivorship bias. Anyone have examples of _failed_
| pivots?
| agomez314 wrote:
| Wonder how long the list is for companies with unsuccessful
| pivots
| alangibson wrote:
| While reading that list, I had a realization that many good
| 'pivots' arent so much pivots as upgrades of a successful feature
| into a product. I wonder if anyone had tried to formalize that
| into a product development methodology.
| ninjaturtlez wrote:
| Didn't Figma start out as a drone company? Compared to that a lot
| of these seem like reaches
| the-dude wrote:
| Mt. Gox
| xwdv wrote:
| What was originally a Magic The Gathering Online Exchange
| became a massive crypto empire eventually toppled by greed and
| mismanagement.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| Although apparently it never actually operated as a trading
| card exchange... that's just what the domain was originally
| "intended" for.
| k__ wrote:
| _" 2007, the service went live for approximately three
| months before McCaleb moved on to other projects, having
| decided it was not worth his time"_
|
| lol, interesting.
| Softcadbury wrote:
| I'm thinking of Epic Games and their game Fortnite. The game was
| some kind of tower defence at the begining. They swithed to
| battle royal and made one of the most played video game of all
| time.
|
| Ok, it's a small pivot, but it changed the company and gave them
| so much money that they were able to create their own game store
| (and fight Apple in court).
| xenihn wrote:
| There's pre-cliff bleszinski Fortnite, and post-cliff
| bleszinski fortnite. It would have not become as huge as it is
| now if he had not been ousted.
| sombremesa wrote:
| > They swithed to battle royal and made one of the most played
| video game of all time.
|
| More specifically, they saw the success of PUBG and decided to
| copy it immediately. I suppose that still counts as a
| successful pivot!
| rkk3 wrote:
| Apple Computer and Microsoft seem notably absent.
| aphroz wrote:
| Samsung was exporting dried Korean fish
| Someone wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me much if they still do that. It is a
| highly diversified company.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung:
|
| _Notable Samsung industrial affiliates include Samsung
| Electronics (the world 's largest information technology
| company, consumer electronics maker and chipmaker measured by
| 2017 revenues), Samsung Heavy Industries (the world's 2nd
| largest shipbuilder measured by 2010 revenues), and Samsung
| Engineering and Samsung C&T Corporation (respectively the
| world's 13th and 36th largest construction companies). Other
| notable subsidiaries include Samsung Life Insurance (the
| world's 14th largest life insurance company), Samsung Everland
| (operator of Everland Resort, the oldest theme park in South
| Korea) and Cheil Worldwide (the world's 15th largest
| advertising agency, as measured by 2012 revenues)_
|
| Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_C%26T_Corporation
| it doesn't seem they still trade in dried fish, but who knows?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Facebook is not in the list... They pivoted from friendlist ->
| wall -> timeline(twitter)
| after_care wrote:
| What's the difference between a pivot and an expansion? Did
| Netflix pivot to online streaming, or did they expand into online
| streaming?
| jeffrwells wrote:
| I founded a company called Milo (https://www.getmilo.com/) - we
| started as a "One Medical For Pets" modern veterinary clinic and
| actually had 3 hospitals before realizing that the real value was
| in the software we had built to make our teams more efficient.
| Now we're pure SaaS
|
| It is definitely challenging to pivot and fighting sunk cost bias
| is massively hard
| Havoc wrote:
| Some of those are so unrelated I'd hardly call them pivots. More
| like currently successful companies that used to do something
| completely different under same brand name
| raldi wrote:
| A classic non-pivot is the Prodigy service, created as an IBM
| spinoff in the 1980s as a sort of proto-Amazon. To their great
| annoyance, instead of shopping, users insisted on chatting with
| each other all day.
|
| They could have embraced this and beaten AOL to the punch, but
| instead they issued an edict that from then on, users would only
| be allowed to send 30 messages a month, and after that, they
| would cost 25 cents each. This was the start of the company's
| death spiral.
| delecti wrote:
| This is a perfect use case for the original meaning of "the
| customer is always right". If customers want to send messages
| then you change your business to a message system.
| willhinsa wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea. This is such an interesting story!
|
| > The price increases prompted an increase of "underground IDs"
| (known as 'UG's for shorthand)--where multiple users shared a
| single account that they turned into private bulletin boards by
| using emails that were returned (and therefore not billed) due
| to invalid email addresses. Those invalid addresses were the
| simple names of the person or people for whom the messages were
| intended. When those people signed in and checked the email,
| they would find "returned" messages with their names. They
| would then "send" a reply by typing the name of the first
| sender, which would also be returned. When that person logged
| on next, they would see their message, and the cycle would
| repeat.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)#Price...
| Semaphor wrote:
| For anyone else who has never heard of them:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
| pjerem wrote:
| An amazing discovery, thank you. Some companies names like
| BioWare, WhatsApp or YouTube totally makes sense now.
| bodhiandpysics1 wrote:
| And of course the pivot to end all pivots:
|
| APPLE!!! Which started as a company that made computers, then
| became a company that made mobile music players, and now is a
| company that makes phones.
| allendoerfer wrote:
| Or every car company that started as a company that made
| gasoline consuming cars and now is producing rolling electric
| computers.
|
| Or every other company, which now essentially makes computers.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I've heard electric cars aptly described as iPads with
| wheels.
|
| So conversely, you could say that when Apple rolled out the
| iPad, that was a pivot to electric cars without wheels.
|
| https://twitter.com/hartsman/status/555953649004716034
|
| https://twitter.com/charlesvonbrown/status/14578242568012636.
| ..
|
| https://network1consulting.com/tuesday-tip-tesla-motors-
| cont...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/8qvxwq/finally.
| ..
|
| https://www.macfilos.com/2021/03/17/first-impressions-of-
| the...
|
| https://www.itbusinessedge.com/business-intelligence/how-
| tes...
| satyrnein wrote:
| My phone thinks of my car as one of its accessories.
| dangus wrote:
| I don't think Apple can count as a pivot because they never
| abandoned their core/existing business, and most of their
| activities are surrounded by and complimentary to their core
| business of general purpose computing devices.
|
| A smartphone itself is just as general purpose as the Macintosh
| or Apple II.
|
| I would classify Apple as "growing into a conglomerate," not
| "pivoting."
|
| Apple right now has a movie screening in theaters, but I don't
| even call that a pivot. It's a complementary product to Apple's
| main business, because TV+ subscriptions have been fueled by
| its built-in-to-the-OS nature. Buy an iPhone, get it free for a
| year, and now you're hooked. Putting the content in theaters is
| just a cherry on top.
|
| Maybe you could argue that offering the iPod and iTunes on
| Windows was a pivot. The iPod being wholly disconnected from
| the Mac was like a different business, and it dominated Apple's
| revenue for a while.
|
| If Apple had discontinued the Mac and focused on iPods, this
| would qualify as a pivot. But what ended up happening was that
| the iPod enhanced Mac sales and led to the Mac essentially
| being made into a portable device with the iPhone ("iPhone runs
| OS X" as Steve Jobs said in the keynote).
|
| The Apple Watch could be a strong argument for a pivot product,
| as it's essentially an entry into the jewelry market. The Apple
| Watch business is supercharged by selling interchangeable
| bands, which have nothing to do with computing. However, it's
| still not a pivot: it _requires_ an iPhone, which itself is
| basically a Mac, and the Watch itself is also still just
| another general purpose computing device based on macOS /OS
| X/NextSTEP.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Then they made the commercial with the kid saying "What's a
| computer?" in the backyard which still enrages everyone I know
| when it is mentioned.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Oh man, I didn't know that Groupon started as The Point, a tool
| to help people organize to work towards a goal. The biggest goal
| ended up being to save money..
|
| Does anyone know of a service today for helping people organize
| around a cause?
| rozab wrote:
| I recently learned from a loading screen message that Discord has
| almost the same origin story as Slack. They were making a mobile
| MOBA called Fates Forever but pivoted when they realised how poor
| the current systems for communicating in games like MOBAs are.
| Unlike Slack though, I don't think code was shared between the
| projects.
|
| https://toucharcade.com/2015/09/14/ex-fates-forever-develope...
| lqet wrote:
| > Netflix had considered offering movies online, but there were
| speeds and bandwidth problem in mid-2000.
|
| One of the more interesting things I learned from the
| (outstanding) documentary "Enron - The Smartest Guys in The Room"
| [0] was that Enron planned an online movie streaming service
| together with Blockbuster in the late 90ies (to start in 2000),
| but failed for the same reasons.
|
| > Enron would store the entertainment and encode and stream the
| entertainment over its global broadband network. Pilot projects
| in Portland, Seattle and Salt Lake City were created to stream
| movies to a few dozen apartments from servers set up in the
| basement. Based on these pilot projects, Enron went ahead and
| recognized estimated profits of more than $110 million from the
| Blockbuster deal, even though there were serious questions about
| technical viability and market demand [1]
|
| But of course Enron "pivoted" to outright fraud some years before
| that.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDyMz1V-GSg
|
| [1]
| https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/0895330037658884...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Enron planned an online movie streaming service together with
| Blockbuster in the late 90ies (to start in 2000), but failed
| for the same reasons._
|
| I lived in Houston during that era, and for some reason a bunch
| of the local energy companies dabbled in internet video and
| infrastructure at the time.
|
| As you mentioned, Enron. But there's also Williams
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_Companies). It built
| one of the first live business news channels. I knew a few
| people who worked there, but I can't remember the name of it.
| Naturally, it was focused on energy. The idea was that people
| in the energy industry would have it on a screen next to their
| computers in their offices.
|
| It worked, a bit. I saw the channel in the break rooms and
| lobbies of several oil and gas companies I visited at the time.
| But, like the Enron/Blockbuster thing, I think it was a little
| ahead of its time. While today a big oil company would think
| nothing of deploying thousands of screens to its cubicles
| around the world, back in those days, it was considered a crazy
| extravagance. Plus, everyone was still using tubes, not flat
| screens, so a big chunk of desk real estate would be lost at a
| time when offices were far more paper-reliant than they are
| now.
|
| Some of the big oil and gas companies saw how the railroads
| were getting into telecom, and follow that, as well. (The "SP"
| in "Sprint" is Southern Pacific Railroad.) They figured if the
| railroads can run phone calls over microwave relays along their
| rights-of-way, the oil companies could run fiber through their
| pipelines. And they did.
|
| Again, I'm most familiar with Williams. It built a huge fiber-
| optic network across the country by running cables through its
| pipelines. One of its services was called VYVX (pronounced
| "viv-ex"). For years and years, it was the primary way to move
| video between television stations at a time when satellite
| hookups were a lot more expensive than they are today.
|
| I know at least part of the Williams network became what we
| know today as Level3. I wonder if the original network is still
| in use. Kind of ironic to think about all those
| environmentalist web sites flowing through fiber running
| through oil pipelines.
| [deleted]
| anyfactor wrote:
| Even after doing multiple assignments on Enron and going
| through multiple lectures about it, I am still not hundred
| percent sure what Enron's business was. The most easy to grasp
| description of their main activity was they were into energy
| based commodities trading. Yet they had their sticky finger in
| every industry.
|
| It was such a massive complicatedly diversified company, I
| think it is reasonable to say if it wasn't whistleblowers we
| wouldn't have never realized what went wrong.
| hashimotonomora wrote:
| Dealmaking. It was hedge fund run by M&A fanatics.
| WoahNoun wrote:
| The natural gas pipeline industry had it's regulations
| changed around '85 that made it so pipeline operators had to
| let anyone use their pipes. This meant Enron didn't have to
| actually own pipes. They could just buy and sell natural gas
| from the wellhead to the refinery. They made a lot of money
| doing this. They then tried to copy that to anything else
| that can conceivably move over a fixed, expensive
| infrastructure like electrical power lines, broadband lines,
| water pipes etc. They wanted to be in heavy industry with an
| "asset lite" model.
|
| The Enron physical pipeline business still exists as Kinder
| Morgan as Enron sold it off because they didn't want to deal
| with the physical infrastructure anymore.
|
| Everything else was just financial engineering.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Enron, Lehman Brothers and similar companies would have
| easily thrived in the 2020s.
|
| Up until 2015, there was really a true cost of capital.
| Investors wanted to see real products, real cashflow, else
| you head straight to bankruptcy.
|
| 2015+ changed a lot of things. You can fraud / lie / deceive
| your way to success if you form a cult around it. Trump,
| Nikola, NFTs, Crypto, Hertz, Gamestop, AMC, Blackberry,
| Tilray, Sundial have all shown you can astroturf, gaslight,
| propagandize a subset of population to fund your fantasies in
| a world awash with capital and very few assets to invest.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Hertz feels weird to me as an example for two reasons:
|
| 1. The company wasn't really leaning into the thing where
| they became a meme stock when they filed for bankruptcy for
| some reason. They did start an at-the-market offering but
| that was stopped pretty quickly by the courts.
|
| 2. It did actually go up for non-meme reasons so the crazy
| people buying stock of a bankrupt company, or rather, the
| people who believed what they read on Reddit and bought the
| stock and didn't sell it, we're vindicated as the company
| did somewhat recover.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| The one I never really quite understood was Slack. Who builds an
| internal chat client, while building an online game, and then
| decides to build a b2b business around that chat client?
|
| The rest at least have some logic to them. You build something,
| people use it for something else, so you generalize. Or you
| pursue a neighboring market or use-case. But the Slack one just
| seems so random.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Check out the "How I Built This", Slack is one of the more
| interesting ones.
| ycombinete wrote:
| I've heard similar stories many times, where someone discovers
| a gap in the market through an actual need that they have while
| trying to do something else.
|
| Like the Kitopi Cloud Kitchen. The story I heard is that the
| guy already had a successful sweet business, and got the idea
| to have little mini distribution kitchens for it, instead of
| opening a new business everytime he wanted to extend his reach.
| Then decided to make that idea a whole business model.
| xcambar wrote:
| [tangent]
|
| Wow, I didn't know Kitopi Cloud Kitchen. This is truly a
| disruptive idea (I never use this word), as it breaks with
| the traditional idea that restaurant food cannot be
| industrialized and has a connection with the chef but also
| the place.
|
| Even after reading this, it is hard for me to think "I could
| order food from this restaurant but the actual meal will come
| from a partner kitchen".
|
| Brilliant from a business perspective, yet somewhat
| questionable culturally.
| ycombinete wrote:
| One cool part about it is that because the portions are so
| industrially controlled there a whole slew of reliably
| calorie counted restaurants available.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Lots of youtubers jumped on this to create their own
| virtual restaurants. MrBeast Burger being the most popular.
| ehnto wrote:
| Is it dropshipping for food, or do the restaurant fronts
| still devise the recipes?
| noisefridge wrote:
| It's not that surprising when you know the history. This is the
| founders' second or third try at live chat with media.
|
| At Ludicorp, in the early oughts, they were building a game
| called Game Neverending. They built a chat feature into that
| game. Then they added the ability to drop photos into chat.
| Digital cameras and cameraphones had just become affordable, so
| suddenly that was the main feature of the game. Flickr had to
| drop the single live chat window when they became too popular,
| and then it became a web-based photo sharing community. But
| they always had plans to bring it back, they just never got
| around to it. Once Flickr was acquired by Yahoo those plans
| became even more difficult to realize.
|
| Like many companies in the middle-oughts, Flickr did everything
| over IRC. When they were acquired by Yahoo, most of them moved
| to San Francisco, but some employees never left Canada. So it
| was a distributed, remote workplace the entire time. It was
| natural to do everything over IRC and add bots and such to help
| you do things.
|
| When the Flickr founders left Yahoo, they founded Glitch, and
| it was also quite distributed, half in Vancouver, BC and half
| in the Bay Area. I'm not sure how they came to build their own
| sharing-media-in-IRC solution again, but they had the tools to
| hand.
|
| A fun aside: as Glitch was failing, but before they pivoted to
| Slack, they downsized. And a lot of those downsized employees
| reformed as "Tomfoolery" and created a product called "Anchor",
| which was basically Slack! There aren't a lot of traces that
| this thing ever existed but here's an article from Fast
| Company:
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/3013553/meet-tomfoolery-the-comp...
|
| I assume that those employees realized that their internal
| tools were actually the best thing that they had made. Anchor
| was led by a former Yahoo executive who had I think been COO at
| Glitch. Tomfoolery/Anchor didn't get much traction and was
| acquihired by Yahoo just a few months later - most of those
| employees were ex-Yahoo anyway.
|
| A few months later Glitch pivoted to Slack and the rest is
| history.
|
| It's unclear to me why Tomfoolery failed when they had all the
| knowledge about how Glitch's Slack worked and a head start of
| many months. I remember a period in 2013 when a group I was
| involved in was choosing between Flowdock (yet another thing
| that was basically Slack) and Anchor and the recently-launched
| Slack. Anchor didn't have the rich integrations of Flowdock.
| Slack was very new and immature and was worse than both of
| them. But Slack improved faster and people like Stewart
| Butterfield had way more goodwill.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| A similar case for a company I previously worked for. They
| started out making high quality photo albums, I believe
| targeted primarily at pets. They built in the deep-linking
| experience, so that you could send links to friends, etc. They
| eventually realized that every app ends up building in their
| own linking, and in turn became branch.io
| xcambar wrote:
| Early people at Slack were nerds and unhappy with the
| communication tools that were available at the time.
|
| So they went the nerd way and hacked together something they
| would not spend most of the time complaining about. "Hacked
| together" is important. It was not dedication, it was
| "scratching your own itch ".
|
| The hack was satisfactorily working. For them.
|
| And when Glitch failed, they were left with (among other
| things) their communication tool. "Someone" thought it was
| worth trying to market it, following the proverbial dogfooding
| strategy, because there was nothing else left to do anyway with
| Glitch.
|
| And boom. Slack.
|
| Source: memories of an article read many years ago that I can't
| find traces of, but was quite fascinating.
| hhh wrote:
| Discord did the same, but it was originally just for one
| community.
| jollybean wrote:
| I believe the story is: their game failed, and they went back
| to Sequoia to return $5M in outstanding investment. Sequoia
| told them to 'keep it, and build something'. So they tried the
| Slack thing.
|
| What's funny is that he's the same dude who founded Flickr,
| which also started out as some kind of game. Ha ha.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Shows that VCs are investing in teams, not what happens to be
| that team's current pitch deck du jour.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Segment is similarly weird. They were building EdTech and then
| decided that this boilerplate file called analytics.js was the
| coolest thing they had built and they pivoted the company
| around that.
| Beldin wrote:
| I don't know Segment, but EdTech is all about analytics.
| Everyone wants hyperspecific data, e.g. do students who
| attend the first three lectures do better than students who
| didn't do that, but were there the last lecture?
|
| So not so surprising, "from a certain point of view" [0].
|
| [0] Sir Guinness.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Ok, good point. I think their analytics.js was just
| tracking website usage, but you're probably right that they
| were planning on deep-inspecting that data in the way you
| suggest.
| rhtgrg wrote:
| You have a lot of responses, but none actually address your
| question...
|
| > Who builds an internal chat client, while building an online
| game, and then decides to build a b2b business around that chat
| client?
|
| Someone who's done something similar -- successfully -- once
| before, that's who. The experience gained from Flickr certainly
| helped with Slack.
| gompertz wrote:
| If I recall correctly, Slack was built utilizing IRC on the
| backend.
|
| I remember that resonating with me as I was sole developer on
| an in-house invoicing system at a Fortune 500, and I added a
| whole corporate chat functionality using IRC libs. It only took
| a few days to implement. It made me aware how easy it can be to
| build a billion dollar business by mistake. Too bad not my
| billion dollar business!
| transcriptase wrote:
| Valve: We used to make games; Now we make money.
| pembrook wrote:
| Another example is Unsplash.
|
| Unsplash was originally a marketing attempt by a company named
| Crew, a marketplace startup trying to connect businesses with
| freelance designers.
|
| After Unsplash took off and the talent marketplace didn't, the
| company became Unsplash.
| iqanq wrote:
| Investigating around the whatsapp pivot, I found their old blog.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110927080704/http://whatsapp.w...
|
| >So first of all, let's set the record straight. We have not, we
| do not and we will not ever sell your personal information to
| anyone. Period. End of story. Hopefully this clears things up.
|
| Heh... :-)
| Belphemur wrote:
| Technically they didn't ... Facebook/Meta did.
|
| I remember when I had to pay 1EUR per year for What's App that
| was only 8 years ago...
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Well since they sold Whatsapp, the company, that was holding
| all of the data, to Facebook, they literally sold all of the
| data at once.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Nintendo existed for nearly one hundred years before they started
| making video games. Saying that all they did up until then was
| not successful is ridiculous - you do not run a company for an
| entire century by not being successful.
| Kranar wrote:
| That's not what the article says. It says that Nintendo tried
| to pivot away from the playing card business into several other
| businesses, each of which ended up failing except for
| electronic toys/video games.
|
| Given that Nintendo no longer operates a taxi service, love
| hotels, or sell instant rice, I would say the article is
| correct about that statement.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| Apollo GraphQL (which just raised a $130M Series D) pivoted from
| Meteor, a company built around supporting the frontend framework
| MeteorJS.
|
| https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/01/17/apollo-graph...
| davidhariri wrote:
| This is great. I'm curious to know what the line is between pivot
| and new company. Is it same successive founders? Same domain?
| Same cap table?
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Interesting fact, Nintendo still makes playing cards, including
| the standard 52 card decks.
|
| Ran into one once, very high quality plastic cards.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Century old example showing pivoting is as old as business:
|
| " When 3M began in 1902, the five founders had a simple goal: to
| mine for corundum, a mineral ideal for making sandpaper and
| grinding wheels. Turns out, what they thought was corundum was
| really another low-grade mineral called anorthosite."
|
| 3M pivoted to selling sand paper without the sand, I.e tape, and
| that helped them survive long enough to try again at sand paper.
| (Transparent tape, invented by 3M, helped them grow during the
| Great Depression because people fixed stuff instead of buying
| anew.)
|
| Funny to see sandpaper still being improved upon after 100 years:
| https://youtu.be/NZDCRFi8dKY
| creeble wrote:
| My favorite "internal slogan" of 3M is (or was): Make it by the
| mile, sell it by the inch.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I wish every company had this motto! It's so often that when
| I need some material, nobody will sell me less than a mile of
| it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| For those who don't know, 3M means "Minnesota Mining and
| Manufacturing."
| cm2187 wrote:
| Not sure if the original business needs to be dead for it to be
| considered a successful pivot. You could include amazon with aws.
| Or Dassault (planes) with Dassault system (CAD). And all the big
| asian conglomerates. You could even include the east india
| company which started as a trading company before becoming a
| colonial administration! My point is that these pivots are quite
| common.
| [deleted]
| sgslo wrote:
| > Segment - Classroom lecture tool - When the product was
| deployed in the classroom, all the students opened their laptop
| and went straight to Facebook instead of using the program.
|
| There is an excellent YC podcast featuring Segment's founder that
| walked through this pivot. Excellent listen:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6B-on-finding-product-ma...
| pezzana wrote:
| It might be interesting to classify the various kinds of pivots.
| For example, one that gets covered from time-to-time is the one
| where customers start using the product differently than the
| founders intended. The examples here are WhatsApp, Yelp, Flickr,
| Groupon, Play-Doh, Segment. But there are a lot more like that.
|
| If you had a language for talking about pivots and why they
| happen, it might be possible to avoid (or induce them) more
| deliberately.
| wenbin wrote:
| Education tech startup -> musical.ly -> acquired by Bytedance ->
| TikTok
| mentos wrote:
| Pixar - 'How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great
| movie studio'
| andi999 wrote:
| What about unsuccessful pivots? Like Borland pivoted from
| compiler to services.
| raldi wrote:
| Twitch started out as Justin.TV, where Justin Kan wore a camera
| on his head 24/7 and livestreamed the results.
|
| Then they expanded to a small handful of streamers, then anybody
| could stream, but it never really took off and they were running
| out of runway.
|
| Then they noticed that the one area growing faster than any other
| was videogame streaming, and rebuilt the whole company around
| that.
| karimf wrote:
| How could I miss that? Added Twitch to the list. Thanks!
| AQuantized wrote:
| Years later a guy named Ice Poseidon took advantage of the fact
| that Pokemon Go required you to walk around outside to play to
| do irl streaming, and the deluge of streamers trying to get
| around the videogame requirement caused them to pivot back to
| allowing non-videogame streams.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Apple. Went from being an unprofitable 1990s personal computer
| manufacturer like IBM, Dell, Compaq, etc. to being a high end AV
| consumer electronics company like Sony.
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