You can’t read an article in Wired or Fast Company, some fawning fiction about a startup’s inexorable and well-deserved charge to world domination, without reading this word at least once. A “pivot” is supposed to recall a ballerina’s demi détourné, a delicate change of course as graceful as it (hopefully) seems intentional. In reality, a startup’s pivot is a panicked sprint comparable to that of a Titanic passenger who’s spotted the last open life raft.
Desperate Pivots
Desperation, not genius, drove transformative pivots.
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Ev’s worst fear was about to be realized: Odeo was going to fail, which meant Ev, the blogging phenomenon, was actually a one-hit wonder. But he reasoned that if he could pivot Odeo into something else, he could save his name in Silicon Valley.
Krieger and Systrom kept typing, trying to ignore their peers, wondering if everyone else was less worried than they were about running out of money. ... If they got hungry before then, they’d buy the sandwich on special for $3.40 at the local bodega. They had to save money because they weren’t sure how long it would take to make Burbn successful, or if it would even be successful.
So for a while we were fighting, tooth and nail, crazy eBay people: "Go away, we don't want you." Eventually we realized that these guys were begging to be our users. We had the moment of epiphany, and for the next 12 months just iterated like crazy on the website version of the product, which is today's PayPal.
As the losses mounted, it became clear that there was only one path forward: We needed to abandon selling hardware. After trying everything we could to sell our Pixar Image Computer, we were finally facing the fact that hardware could not keep us going. Like an explorer perched on the edge of a melting ice floe, we needed to leap to more stable ground.
Still other devices, invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purposes. It may come as a surprise to learn that these inventions in search of a use include most of the major technological breakthroughs of modern times, ranging from the airplane and automobile, through the internal combustion engine and electric light bulb, to the phonograph and transistor. Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.
Things are always obvious after the fact. ... When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place. ... While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward.