Someone on HN said Notion started as a research tool. Couldn't find info on that online, but it got me interested in thinking about unusual/interesting pivots. I've read about some of the big ones (Odeo --> Twitter, Tote --> Pinterest), but curious if anyone has more recent or lesser known ones.
HotMail (remember that?) started this way.<p>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.<p>Naturally, the VCs asked: did you do it on company time? Did you communicate via the company's email system?<p>Nope, came the answer. We thought about that and built this email system to exchange messages while we worked on the product.<p>And the VCs eyes lit up: tell us more about this email system!
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.
Slack is a great story.<p>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<p><a href="https://review.firstround.com/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Shares-Their-Epic-Launch-Strategy" rel="nofollow">https://review.firstround.com/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Sh...</a>
Cisco is a famous example. They were founded to build a clone of the beloved PDP-10 mainframe. To bring in some cash they made copies of the stanford LAN routers the team had designed and built at Stanford. Turns out a lot of people wanted networking gear.<p>Years later some of the founders founded XKL to make a PDP-10 clone.
BOYSTOYS.COM, which ran a strip club in San Francisco, pivoted to manufacturing antifreeze as GlyEco.<p>Yes, someone did a full-scale IPO for a San Francisco strip club during the original dot-com boom. Ticker symbol GRLZ. SEC central index key 0000931799, if you want to track the history of the company.
Discord itself says this in their welcome messages but they used to be a game development studio that tried to develop an mobile MOBA game called Fates Forever back in 2014. However they found VOIP software to be pretty problematic and pivoted to develop VOIP software for gamers. Now they're a very popular chat client.<p><a href="https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Discord#:~:text=Advertisement-,History,game%20development%20studio%2C%20in%202012" rel="nofollow">https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Discord#:~:text=Advertisemen...</a>.
Brian Armstrong pivoted from "payments enabler for Bitcoin" (Bitbank) -- to -- "cryptocurrencies exchange" (Coinbase) : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815403" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815403</a><p>In other words, he pivoted from an idea analogous to Visa/PayPal/Stripe/etc -- to -- a forex exchange market and financial broker/custodian.<p>[To downvoters, if my information is incorrect, please add the correction. I linked Brian's 2012 text where he described what he was initially trying to create.]<p>EDIT ADD reply to: <i>>because you pretty clearly need to build the exchange to make the payment thing work.</i><p>Thank you for your comment. I'm using the term "exchange market" in the sense of a full blown currency trading platform that has a <i>"order book"</i> to constantly match buy/bid and sell/ask orders. His initial description of "disrupting credit-card fees" did not require building that type of exchange platform. Instead, he just needs to be a "bank" that acts on behalf of users via the "custodian" ownership model. This would let users convert USD$ into BTC and they can then pay each other. The first business name for the website on his prototype screenshot was "Bitbank" which makes sense for the idea that emphasizes <i>ecommerce payments</i> rather than the trading of cryptocurrencies itself. E.g. Stripe enables payments and deals with 135+ currencies but does not have a "currencies trading platform with a buy/sell order book".
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+.
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.<p>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 to be fast.
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.<p>Another is IBM which originally built analog census taking machines and cash registers, but "pivoted" into the emerging world of digital computers.<p>Polaroid originally started off with Edwin Land's invention of polarized lenses which he sold in large number to world war 2 aviators. The instant camera was a pet project which exploded in success.<p>Many people might be surprised to learn that Intel did not go whole hog into CPUs after the 4004 processor. Intel made most of its money selling memory for mainframe computers. The revolutionary 4004 CPU was designed for a japanese calculator company that didn't even put up the cash for the original order. It was the automated decision-making processes that Robert Noyce set up that made sure the 4004 continued to get funding once people started buying them, and it took a while to get out of the memory making business.
Brex went from virtual reality goggles -> corporate finance saas<p>They basically started on the billing system for their VR and decided to pivot to that.
Arguably more an expansion of the original idea than a pivot, but Twitch used to be justin.tv which was just a single 24-hour livestream of Justin Kan, they later expanded it to allow other people to broadcast as well and then noticed their gaming channels was doing really well and rebranded as Twitch to solely focus on gaming.
Warren Buffet turned a textile manufacturing company into a holding.<p>An automatic loom manufacture got turned into one of the biggest automobile companies: Toyota<p>Nokia was initially a pulp mill.<p>Microsoft initially sold a BASIC interpreter, then a Unix, then MS-DOS.
It could depend on what is considered 'a pivot'. Some companies start out with grandiose plans only to find out that they don't have enough money or other resources to develop, market, and support 'Plan A'. So they take a piece of what they already have working and build a product around that to 'prime the pump'. Before they know it, the pump primer turns into 'Plan B' and they never get back to the original plan.<p>I have experienced some of that with my current project. It is designed to be a global distributed data management system, but I am currently marketing it as a simple data analytics tool because that is the part that is working the best right now. <a href="https://www.Didgets.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.Didgets.com</a>
Apparently Nextdoor was previously a "crowdsourced almanac of professional and college athletes" called Fanbase <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fanbase" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fanbase</a><p>Pivot story: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-16558" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-16558</a>
My friend Jason wrote this Tweet with 5 examples I don't think gets talked about much: <a href="https://twitter.com/JasonShen/status/1560680372463173637" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/JasonShen/status/1560680372463173637</a><p>Most notable one was probably Grubwithus (meet people over meals) -> GOAT (sneakers marketplace, valued at $3.7B)
Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah got into YC with an idea centered around sharing wifi bandwidth using blockchain.<p>They saw the rise of Crypto Kitties, and how people were buying and selling them online. They pivoted mid YC batch into building an NFT marketplace called Opensea.
Segment was a wildly successful one (with a big exit). They started out as an education tool startup.<p>Also Slack was a MMORPG for something like 3-4 years before they gave up on it and pivoted to being a chat app.
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.<p>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.
MtGox, the infamous Bitcoin exchange that handled over 70% of the Bitcoin trading volume of 2010 was originally "Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange", a site for trading magic cards in MtG: Online. I don't know if it's that wild of a pivot, trading one virtual object and then trading another, but magic cards sure seem more innocuous.
This is a pretty decent list if you are interested in the concept and looking for examples.<p><a href="https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivot" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivo...</a>
The biggest European travel/tourism company "TUI Group" used to be a mining and heavy industry company: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUI_Group#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUI_Group#History</a>. Quite an interesting shift.
I really dislike these stories because virtually all these companies lose the script (no second act). It seems that companies that start with a larger vision have multiple acts. Microsoft with software going from programming tools to OS to office to cloud. Apple with computing going from computers to iPods, phones, and tablets. Google with organizing the worlds information and making it accessible. Perhaps it is survival bias or perhaps I am mistaken.
A pivot away from tech but I found the Pixar story to be super interesting. One of Steve Job’s more interesting strategic accomplishments imo. My favorite part of the Walter Isaacson book.
Air BNB<p>Started as a tool for renting rooms in cities during conferences, where hosts were expected to provide no more than an air mattress.<p>Pivoted to full on house renting.<p>Chesky talks about it all here in the blitzscaling series, an interview series conducted by Reid Hoffman:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo</a>
Sony started by selling electrically heated cushions: <a href="https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/1-01.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyH...</a>
Not exactly a pivot - but toyoda started manufacturing automatic looms, before cars (as Toyota):
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota#History" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota#History</a>
We're not a big company (yet lol), but we have an interesting pivot story.<p>In 2019, my friend and I bootstrapped a white-labelled SaaS for Professional Sports Teams to have their own (personalized) mobile applications through which they can interact with their fans (i.e. exclusive behind-the-scenes content, tickets, merchandise, trivia, etc.) We landed a small client then a few big clients, and then COVID happened as soon as we were about to scale. In a matter of few months, we went from being on the verge to breakeven to existing clients defaulting on their payments and potential clients going from wanting our products to not wanting in a span of 3-months. The situation was pretty bad.<p>At that point, I had to sit with the team and be transparent about our situation (from both a financial and a market standpoint). Luckily for us, the team was willing to undergo a pivot and throw everything we had previously built away. But we all agreed to do so under one condition: we will only pivot to a problem that we're passionate about and that is worthwhile.<p>The problem? We found the market we were interested in (Gamers & Content Creators), but we could not exactly pinpoint the problem we wanted to solve at the time. But we had (and still have) an amazing team so we believed it would be a matter of time until we figured the pain-point out.<p>At that point (August 2020), we only had 5-months worth of runway. We knew from consuming content (and creating it ourselves) how difficult it was to get discovered as a content creator, so we spent two months building a website that allowed Livestreamers to mirror their Twitch streams while also posting short-recorded content in an attempt to help them funnel in more viewers to their livestreams. We launched bith.tv in November 20202, and in our first year we had (organically) around ~250K unique viewers, then we decided to pivot once again. In that one year, we managed to pinpoint the actual pain-point after noticing how a) difficult it was for gamers to edit their content and b) how overwhelming it was to tailor their edited content to the various social media platforms that exist and cross-post it across them all.<p>So in November 2021, we underwent our second pivot and since then have built an easy-to-use cloud-based video editor with social media publishing tools in an effort to simplify the entire content creation journey for gamers.
Nokia used to make toilet paper and rubber boots.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nokia" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nokia</a>
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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway</a>
Comrod (<a href="https://www.comrod.com/about/company-history/" rel="nofollow">https://www.comrod.com/about/company-history/</a>) is one of my lesser known favourites.<p>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.
I saw it mentioned in a reply, but Soylent was the first time I ever heard the word pivot used for a business. Here is the hn thread for the article "The Biggest Pivot in YC History"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5812500" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5812500</a>
Mitel allegedly first stood for "Mike and Terry's Lawnmowers". But when their first lawnmowers were lost in shipping, they pivoted to telecommunications.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitel</a>
Zymergen hired ~300+ PhD biologists over the years to solve the thousands of genetic engineering problem in multiple biological models. $T market<p>They also hired ~10 robotics people to reduce technician time and error for the workflow.<p>Now, they seem to only be selling the robotics. $100M market?<p>Unclear where all that bio IP went.
Heroku pivoted from an online code editor (or "FileMaker Pro for the web") to a git-based development platform.<p><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/adamwiggins/epic-pivot" rel="nofollow">https://www.slideshare.net/adamwiggins/epic-pivot</a>
This company pivoted 27 times before finding its current product market fit. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W09ChyR6-DQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W09ChyR6-DQ</a>
Agaveapi was originally for data crunching in construction but there was just no way to get the data so it became an integration platform for all the various construction software.
TUI, a german turism company and one of the biggest in the world was founded as Preussag AG to manage mines an ironworks belonging to the state of prussia.
Agave was originally for data crunching in construction but there was just no way to get the data so it became an integration platform for all the various software.
I believe both Slack and Discord started developing video games, then realized the communication tools for large video game-scale teams aren't good enough.
Peugeot successively made :<p>- Wheat flour<p>- Steel<p>- Saws<p>- Coffee grinders<p>- Corsets<p>- Bicycles<p>- Cars<p>You can still buy Peugeot grinders and bicycles.
Netscape started as a virtual conference room back in the 90s before they had to scale it back to just a browser.<p>Twitch aka JustinTV, at one point the founding team tried to sell coffee tables with your blog post of choice printed on it.
The intern who pivoted Fog Creek was an interesting story<p><a href="https://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-thanks-or-no-thanks.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-t...</a> (2006)