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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?

#61

Post by rmason »

mtmail wrote: post #41
scrollaway wrote: post #36

Didn't youtube start off as a dating website?

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

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.

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

#62

Post by sjg1729 »

preommr wrote: post #29
dvtrn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not even the first time that happened. Stewart Butterfield previously tried to make a game that eventually became flickr.

And discord was split off from a LoL-like game when it turned out to be the best part about it

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

#63

Post by robocat »

hbrn wrote: post #30

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+.

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-...

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

#65

Post by mkl »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

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…

640KB, not 64. That limit was such a ridiculous pain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory

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

#67

Post by cperciva »

tristor wrote: post #39
ak_111 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Nintendo started (140 years ago!) also as card trading company before becoming a console giant

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…

I thought the issue with card games wasn't that they were Western, but rather that they were gambling.

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

#68

Post by rmason »

quartz wrote: post #9

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.

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...

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

#69

Post by gumby »

pinewurst wrote: post #46
gumby wrote: post #12

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.

Which in turn pivoted to optical networking equipment. ;)

Well by that point the market for PDP-10s was pretty much nil.
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