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Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

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Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

#11

Post by papreclip »

lucakiebel wrote: post #5
jollybean wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then he started another game company which became Slack!

The guy doesn’t sound like he’s that good at game companies, still should probably continue though

maybe he's just tricking game devs into applying their work ethic to other product lines

Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

#12

Post by gumby »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

#14

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

#15

Post by dvtrn »

k4ch0w wrote: post #13

Slack, MMO to Chat client is probably the most interesting and stark pivot

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.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

#16

Post by pnw »

emptysea wrote: post #10
bjord wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I think that’s actually the Slack origin story you’re thinking of, but honestly discord could have the same origin.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

#17

Post by eps »

jollybean wrote: post #3
tesseract wrote: post #2

Game Neverending --> Flickr

Then he started another game company which became Slack!

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.

Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

#20

Post by rickyyean »

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)

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