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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?

#181

Post by marcusverus »

_fat_santa wrote: post #173

Not a startup obviously but the pivot of Berkshire Hathaway after Warren Buffet bought it is pretty incredible. Company started in textile manufacturing in the late 1800's, after buffet bought it he expanded the company until it became the conglomerate we know today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway

Don't leave out this little gem:

> In 1962, Warren Buffett began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway after noticing a pattern in the price direction of its stock whenever the company closed a mill. Eventually, Buffett acknowledged that the textile business was waning and the company's financial situation was not going to improve. In 1964, Stanton made an oral tender offer to buy back Buffett's stake in the company for $11 1⁄2 per share. Buffett agreed to the deal. A few weeks later, Warren Buffett received the tender offer in writing, but the tender offer was for only $11 3⁄8. Buffett later admitted that this lower, undercutting offer made him angry. Instead of selling at the slightly lower price, Buffett decided to buy more of the stock to take control of the company and fire Stanton (which he did).

The Oracle of Omaha's first big move was driven, in part, by his desire to settle a grudge!

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

#185

Post by jaywalk »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #149
1024core wrote: post #95

HotMail (remember that?) started this way. The founders had an idea for a database hosted on the web(?), and pitched it to some VCs. They had been working on it as a side gig. Naturally, the VCs asked: did you do it on company time? Did you communicate via the company's email system? Nope, came the answer. We thought about that and built this email system to exchange messages while we worked on the product. And the V…

I wonder… why would an email system make their eyes light up? Must have been more to it than that

If you never had an @hotmail.com email address, you're probably too young to understand what a big deal web-based email was back then.

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

#187

Post by joegahona »

yesenadam wrote: post #101
joegahona wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing this -- I didn't realize this existed. Instagram is covered in your link, and you can hear about it from the founder in this really good Lex Fridman podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pvpNKUPbIY These lists always kind of remind me of popular bands that changed music over time. The most drastic "pivot" I've ever come across in a known band is Ministry, who went from a benign new-wave Depe…

Thanks, the Ministry evolution was funny, and made me think of this comparably drastic one: Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (1959) [0] to Live-Evil (1971) [1] to Rated X (1974) [2] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAxefAW4J1g [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sDYPbiwMA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrjFtbGKqFk

This is bonkers -- I don't really follow/listen to jazz, but was aware of "So What" and the other Miles Davis standards -- I had no idea he went this direction. Was he just stretching the genre as far as possible at this point? The "genre-stretching" thing is something I've been thinking about lately and trying to identify -- the band Swans has done this convincingly imo with rock, especially with the 2013 album "To Be Kind."

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

#188

Post by namelosw »

1024core wrote: post #95

HotMail (remember that?) started this way. The founders had an idea for a database hosted on the web(?), and pitched it to some VCs. They had been working on it as a side gig. Naturally, the VCs asked: did you do it on company time? Did you communicate via the company's email system? Nope, came the answer. We thought about that and built this email system to exchange messages while we worked on the product. And the V…

An even more interesting and funny perspective is from another programmer beforehand:

In this post-mortem talk [0] on Diablo 1. The creator mentioned his worst business decision - the Hotmail guy offering 10% of the company in return for an office in the back they weren't even using, and he rejected it.

According to him, the pitch was: "I'm going to make email over the Internet".

His response: "Dude, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard! What are you talking about, I already have my email over the Internet - this isn't even an invention!".

14 months later, that 10% was worth $40 million. Meanwhile they agreed to do Diablo only for $300k for Blizzard, and that was a bad deal - they even had to find more contracts to compensate it.

[0] https://youtu.be/Mlrrc_vy79E?t=2040

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

#189

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

jcims wrote: post #147
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #144

I worked in a place before, that I won't name due to legal unpleasantness, but started life as a travel marketing company, and pivoted to some banking/finance customer management when the pandemic properly took hold. They exited not too long ago for about 150M after firing the CTO just before their big payday. I guess the co-founders spending a lot of their early seed money on strip clubs didn't deter later investors…

Did they get bought by a bank? I may have been on the other side of that lol.

Dude, if it was the same deal, there's a few major sleaze-bags who just got VP positions in the parent company, the worst sort of tech-bros you can imagine.

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

#190

Post by quickthrower2 »

jaywalk wrote: post #185
quickthrower2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder… why would an email system make their eyes light up? Must have been more to it than that

If you never had an @hotmail.com email address, you're probably too young to understand what a big deal web-based email was back then.

I had one. My point is that was the finished thing. And it’s appeal to me was that it was free not that it was web based. Freeness required a VC. Was making web based email (if that era standard) a real hard technical challenge that only one dev team could do it?
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