21–30 of 120 posts
On the other hand, Microsoft was just a BASIC vendor, Amazon was a bookseller, Netflix was mail oder DVD company. Sometimes if you have a really good team/organization it makes sense to pivot based on the market.
Does past performance matter?
For those who (like me) didn't get the reference, the "Ship of Theseus" is a thought problem about whether, if every part of the ship has individually been replaced, it remains the Ship of Theseus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
The crane thing was actively stupid, and very obviously could not ever have worked. An investor who bothered to consult literally any mechanical engineer would have run a mile. Lots did, of course. But somebody bade the thing up.
The current "condominium for concrete blocks" scheme could probably be made to sort of work, for a while, until it breaks, but only at 100x the price of the storage that utilities will actually buy, instead, because they are not all complete idiots, and anyway have engineers on staff.
I expect NRGV to pivot to orbital beamed solar power, next, or orbital mirrors to light up your solar farm at night. Anything that would take a long time to prove can't work would meet their needs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's tricky though, you often can't tell if you are in the survivor set or not until after all those attempts at perseverance. Its easy to assume that after N failures the company is not in the survivor set, but you can never actually know. So without perseverance, no one would be a survivor.
OP here. I think i mixed the message too much by putting pivots in the same category as founder transitions and down-rounds. Pivots are fine. But when you're basically just starting over on a completely new business with less money and a demoralized team, your likelihood of success is significantly impaired. Successful pivots need to carry ~something~ over of value
My first startup went through 2 majors pivots and eventually did quite well. The most valuable bit though was the experience. Second startup is in great shape thanks to that experience. I think many founders give up too early. You wont learn if you don't go through some difficult experiences.
It's when VCs enter the picture that this becomes complicated. VCs want their pound of flesh back generally sooner than you will get lucky.
On the other hand, that advice would have killed off Tesla and SpaceX at least 15 years ago.
What about the classic story of the AirBnB founders pivoting from selling cereal? It seems like the metric for whether you decide to pivot or shut down depends on how many rounds you've done and how many employees you have. Early on, couple of founders & handful of employees: maybe do whatever pivots you can to survive. If you're a big boat and pivoting will require firing 80% your staff and starting an entirely diff…
That is very bad advice. If I did shut evrything down once I hit some hard opposition, I'd never finish anything. The better advice is, try, fail, try again util you succeed. Success is overcoming obstacles.