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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?

#81

Post by nl »

jasode wrote: post #42

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 de…

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.

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

#82

Post by rparmar »

bjrobz wrote: post #33

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

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.

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

#84

Post by Xcelerate »

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+.

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.

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

#86

Post by 1270018080 »

Xcelerate wrote: post #84
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+.

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.

My dumb guess: The people financially-conscious enough to budget aren't the ones willing to pay for a budgeting service.

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

#88

Post by yen223 »

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…

> "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

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

#89

Post by 1270018080 »

jd_illa wrote: post #71
kujin88 wrote: post #70

Interesting that no one mentioned Netflix, which originally started off as nothing more than a rentals company.

Netflix is a cool one but the transition from rentals to streaming feels more like a natural progression than a pivot.

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.

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

#90

Post by raldi »

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.
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