131–140 of 204 posts
Started out making steel and fibreglass fishing rods in the 1950s. Pivoted to making high-performance antennas in the 1960s. This move makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but most people's initial reaction is surprise.
Slack is a great story. Basically a tool they built in-house, the company were going bust and they realised that the "tool" had some value and out popped Slack https://review.firstround.com/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Sh...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny thing is this was the second time Stewart Butterfield tried to build a massively multiplayer game and pivoted the company. The first one was Flickr! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield
The man just wants to make MMOs but accidentally keeps creating billion dollar companies!
Warren Buffet turned a textile manufacturing company into a holding. An automatic loom manufacture got turned into one of the biggest automobile companies: Toyota Nokia was initially a pulp mill. Microsoft initially sold a BASIC interpreter, then a Unix, then MS-DOS.
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.
Nokia used to make toilet paper and rubber boots. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nokia
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…
HoTMaiL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com
Ahh.. never knew that's where the name comes from.
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+.
That is not that interesting. It's something everyone realizes when they try make a budgeting app. Plaid decided to break the rules to create a product. They collected end users authentication details and pretended to be them to scrape data from financial institutions.
This isn't quite a pivot, but Tandy was originally a leathergoods company that acquired a massive stake in Radioshack. For several decades it was known for its microcomputers during the dawn of the personal computer era. Today the leathergoods branch still exists, but the computer branch does not. Another is IBM which originally built analog census taking machines and cash registers, but "pivoted" into the emerging w…
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.
If you've got a Japanese coworker who likes traveling from Japan to your area, or a remailer service you trust, Nintendo sells a mahjong set on their spare parts store in Japan.