Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Pivot

dilbert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 121 posts

Re: The Pivot

#91

Post by burnte »

Here's my problem with Scott Adams: he thinks he's a lot more clever than he really is, and he is down right smarmy about it. I've been in the dot-com start up pressure cooker, I'm in another start up right now. The one I was part of over a decade ago needed to pivot and failed, miserably. It didn't have to, but it did. We had great people and a solid foundation, but needed to reorient. We didn't due to management, and it went tits up in no time. Tens of millions of dollars flushed down the toilet. The one I'm part of now, we've only spent a little over $100k, and after a couple setbacks, we're realizing a pivot is needed, but one that actually will save the core of the company and make it more successful.

Scott Adams comes in and discovers the idea of pivoting, paints it as a startup concept that he can see through and discover how it's being misused, and writes another pretentious blog post about it. Pivoting has been a business tool for centuries. Nintendo used to make playing cards, Nokia made rubber products and paper, Berkshire Hathaway was a textile mill, AmEx did mail. They all pivoted when the time called for it.

What these startups are doing is realizing they have an idea that for whatever reason, they can't pull off. Maybe it's a bad idea, maybe it's the wrong team for the job, whatever. So rather than break up the company, they SAVE THE COMPANY. Just like a human who changes jobs if the need arises, so do companies, which are run by people. They get together as a team, and figure out what they did wrong, and what they can do to fix it, and pivot. They come up with a new plan to save the company.

And now Scott Adams makes the realizations that some startups are based on bad ideas, that some react to the market to survive, and that others have taken this as a lesson to realize the objective is to find success rather than hold on to your core idea until you die. And he shares this with us as the benevolent braintrust he is. Scott, open a business textbook written anytime since 1900. This is not a unique nor new idea.

Oh, and the Internet IS a technology, it's one that enables many things, like psychological/market experiments, but it's still a technology. Don't think so hard next time, Scott. You'll hurt yourself.

Re: The Pivot

#92

Post by sirdogealot »

burnte wrote: post #91

Here's my problem with Scott Adams: he thinks he's a lot more clever than he really is, and he is down right smarmy about it. I've been in the dot-com start up pressure cooker, I'm in another start up right now. The one I was part of over a decade ago needed to pivot and failed, miserably. It didn't have to, but it did. We had great people and a solid foundation, but needed to reorient. We didn't due to management, a…

I missed the part where Adams championed the pivot as the greatest business innovation of all time.

He starts out the article rather casually: "You might be interested in some of the things I've discovered.".

If you don't generally care what he has to say, why did you bother to read it? He was only commenting on an interesting aspect of our industry.

You don't see too many car companies pivoting to motorcycles, for example. Learning about "the pivot" is interesting reading to a lot of people, just maybe not for you and I.

Re: The Pivot

#93

Post by PhantomGremlin »

hmsimha wrote: post #64
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Probably because it's not exactly true. The whole point of all that data is to see which aspects of a business work and which parts don't. The author is describing pivots a bit hyperbolically for the sake of drama/artistic license, but it's not like the C-level executives pivot by rolling the dice and seeing what they come up with. A successf…

Succeeding in the startup world is luck like succeeding in poker is luck. Sure, there is an element of luck undeniably involved, but in the long term, raw talent should play a significant role as well.

I, for one, liked your analogy. Poker is an excellent example of how talent combines with luck.

Re: The Pivot

#94

Post by PhantomGremlin »

freshhawk wrote: post #40
wlievens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is: how do you discover and identify a good b2b problem that needs solving in the first place.

Got some great pithy advice about this a while ago: find something still being done with paper and fax machines. There are a ridiculous number of them out there.

That's good advice. In fact, this HN discussion has a "ridiculous" (in a good sense) amount of good advice.

The only problem is it's a lot easier to post, comment, kibitz, criticize than to actually do. It's nice to read the good advice here, but at the end of the day it's still necessary to do something useful in a startup. This isn't a criticism of your post, it's a general observation.

Re: The Pivot

#95

Post by voronoff »

imgabe wrote: post #75
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually true? I know it's definitely not true if a million people are rolling dice forever -- each die should land on 1-6 with equal frequency. Given a limited number of rolls, though; say, 20 rolls per person; is there actually a consistent, measurable percentage of people that will outperform others? Somehow I doubt it.

Let's say you have a million people. They each roll a 6 sided die. The odds of getting any one number are 1/6. The odds of getting any given number 5 times in a row are 1/6^5 or about .0001286. Out of your million people, 128 of them will probably roll e.g. 3 five times in a row. It doesn't mean they have a particular talent for rolling 3s. If you get the million people to roll 5 more times, probably a different set…

This is reminding very much of the debate around the Efficient Market Hypothesis, as to whether traders can be systematically good vs. just repeatedly lucky. There is a lot of lit on this issue.

Re: The Pivot

#96

Post by [deleted] »

imgabe wrote: post #75
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually true? I know it's definitely not true if a million people are rolling dice forever -- each die should land on 1-6 with equal frequency. Given a limited number of rolls, though; say, 20 rolls per person; is there actually a consistent, measurable percentage of people that will outperform others? Somehow I doubt it.

Let's say you have a million people. They each roll a 6 sided die. The odds of getting any one number are 1/6. The odds of getting any given number 5 times in a row are 1/6^5 or about .0001286. Out of your million people, 128 of them will probably roll e.g. 3 five times in a row. It doesn't mean they have a particular talent for rolling 3s. If you get the million people to roll 5 more times, probably a different set…

[deleted]

Re: The Pivot

#97

Post by rglullis »

diego wrote: post #85
hmsimha wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Succeeding in the startup world is luck like succeeding in poker is luck. Sure, there is an element of luck undeniably involved, but in the long term, raw talent should play a significant role as well.

You do realize that you can play hundreds of poker hands in a night. For your analogy to hold, you'd need to be able to start companies for a million years.

Call me cynical, but to me it feels like the people working on the startup are the cards of the game, being played by the VCs and the status quo.

Re: The Pivot

#98

Post by hmsimha »

diego wrote: post #85
hmsimha wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Succeeding in the startup world is luck like succeeding in poker is luck. Sure, there is an element of luck undeniably involved, but in the long term, raw talent should play a significant role as well.

You do realize that you can play hundreds of poker hands in a night. For your analogy to hold, you'd need to be able to start companies for a million years.

Of course! There are professional poker players who run bad for months at a time even. Variance is a cruel mistress. That doesn't negate the fact that talent certainly gives you an edge in poker or in the startup world. It's easy to say it's all luck, but that attitude doesn't pay service to the many successful people who had raw talent or an excellent idea in addition to the luck that allowed them to become successful.

Re: The Pivot

#99

Post by ejain »

There's a difference between pivoting to a random new exciting idea when the previous idea doesn't pan out, and pivoting e.g. when you discover that your product happens to have a feature that a significant number of people are willing to pay for.

Re: The Pivot

#100

Post by ef4 »

timr wrote: post #41
wdewind wrote: post #12

For those of us not working on cat photo sharing products for the ever shifting consumer market there is considerably less luck, throwing random stuff at the wall, and pivoting involved. B2B SaaS is pretty nice. Join us on the dark side :)

"For those of us not working on cat photo sharing products for the ever shifting consumer market there is considerably less luck, throwing random stuff at the wall, and pivoting involved." ...but how do you know that? The principal disadvantage of B2B is that the long sales cycle greatly increases the time until you get feedback that your product sucks, so you either succeed (in which case, of course, you say "it was…

> The principal disadvantage of B2B is that the long sales cycle greatly increases the time until you get feedback that your product sucks

Waiting to sell until after you've built something is just as foolhardy in B2B as in B2C.

The equivalent winning strategy in B2B is to pitch the idea to the first customers before it's even built. If you can't convince them to commit, you pivot. If you find excited customers, they become your close feedback through the whole dev process.

Atypical early adopters may steer you wrong, but that can happen in the consumer space too.

Post reply on HN