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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?

#191

Post by timr »

blululu wrote: post #126
timr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sharp started out making mechanical pencils. Panasonic started out making lightbulb sockets. Mitsubishi started as a shipping company.

Though I believe all these companies still make these products. They have simply expanded into other sectors.

Sharp doesn't make mechanical pencils, so far as I know. I'd also be sort of surprised if Panasonic made lightbulb sockets.

To your broader point, though, it's true that most of the major Japanese conglomerates have amusing/modest origins and have accrued side-businesses over time until they became goliaths.

It's still interesting that a company like Panasonic began with something so mundane. Other than a few cases like IBM (which began as separate companies making time clocks and card punchers), it's not that common a story in the western market.

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

#192

Post by mxuribe »

jollybean wrote: post #116
mxuribe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless...This is a mind trick that he uses to trick his mind into thinking that *this time* I'll really develop a game...and then fully expecting that something else will be created! I mean, some other creative people resort to all manner of tricks - like alcohol, weed, etc. - just to trigger the muse and serendipitous invention!

That's the best 'company culture hack' ever. Join out creative gaming company! (But really we're going to sell SaaS against Microsoft, I'm just not honest with myself yet!)

There will have to be a chapter devoted to this topic in my (fictional) book: "A Dictator's Guide: Your Next Step After Being Fired from Corporate America for Being A Sociopath". ;-)

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

#193

Post by w10-1 »

Zymergen hired ~300+ PhD biologists over the years to solve the thousands of genetic engineering problem in multiple biological models. $T market

They also hired ~10 robotics people to reduce technician time and error for the workflow.

Now, they seem to only be selling the robotics. $100M market?

Unclear where all that bio IP went.

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

#194

Post by jcims »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #189
jcims wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Banks hand out VP positions like candy. Executive Director and/or Managing Director are more inline with tech industry VP/SVP positions.

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

#195

Post by Ancapistani »

justusthane wrote: post #152
ErikAugust wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” ― Norman Vincent Peale

Or, you know, come crashing back to earth at terminal velocity.

That beats drifting out into deep space, alive but unable to do anything other than watch your life support system slowly but inevitably fail.

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

#196

Post by jollybean »

mxuribe wrote: post #192
jollybean wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the best 'company culture hack' ever. Join out creative gaming company! (But really we're going to sell SaaS against Microsoft, I'm just not honest with myself yet!)

There will have to be a chapter devoted to this topic in my (fictional) book: "A Dictator's Guide: Your Next Step After Being Fired from Corporate America for Being A Sociopath". ;-)

They would never admit being that! Nor would they be fired for being a sociopath.

And the book already exists: "The Art of the Deal"

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

#197

Post by barrysteve »

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

Games are a hotbed for new ideas. Like a sandbox, you are challenged with making something fresh and new just to justify being there.

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

#198

Post by manquer »

55555 wrote: post #142
manquer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warren Buffet was always a investor he didn’t himself pivot anything. He didn’t found Berkshire he just bought a old public not very healthy textile company and used it as his investment vehicle /holding company and dumped its assets.

Yes all correct, just like the parent, but technically he did pivot the textile mill company into an investment company, even tho Warren Buffet himself didn't pivot (altho he's arguably pivoted a bit from his original investment strategy, but this a thread for large pivots).

Berkshire Hathaway the textile company died more than pivoted.

The kind of change that Berkshire Hathaway went through is fairly well used tool in finance. Every SPAC does the kind of the same for example, asset stripping and selling in parts or becoming a holding company is natural way for companies in late stage to die.[1]

Alphabet becoming a holding company is perhaps closer to a pivot for holding and operating companies than Berkshire

[1] A recent example would be Altaba that was created from the remnants of Yahoo.

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

#199

Post by BryantD »

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…

Man, memories. I worked for Phar Lap for, I dunno, a few months. Cool place.

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

#200

Post by wizofaus »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #190
jaywalk wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd been building increasingly sophisticated CGI-based web apps at the time (as a hobby) and still remember being blown away with what appeared to be a fully functional email client running inside Netscape. This was before Javascript was commonly available or standardized, and certainly no XmlHttpRequest etc.
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