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The Pivot

516 pointsby pdsullalmost 11 years ago

32 comments

ritchieaalmost 11 years ago
What really bothers me about this type of thinking is the assumption that every team is equally talented &amp; motivated. I might go as far as saying the talent&#x2F;intelligence landscape is somewhat homogenous but having been around early stage startups for years now there is definitely a power law distribution of motivation &amp; organization. It&#x27;s a lot easier to say you will do anything to succeed and act the part and struggle and listen to your investors like they&#x27;re bosses and let your startup die out while going through the motions than it is to be relentlessly resourceful. It also benefits to be self critical and unattached to an ideal of a product in a way to allow your product to be what your users respond to rather than some stubborn vision.<p>All this to say, there are definitely a ton of bad startups out there, people who see an easy fundraising landscape, take advantage of connections or even make them. Or people that get to a certain point and don&#x27;t really want to face reality. Instead of floating all the platitudes we float about there being lots of talented teams, it would be nice to see some honesty. That a lot of startups have a founder or two that isn&#x27;t that dedicated but is there because he&#x2F;she isn&#x27;t sure what else to be doing. That a lot of startups are a vanity project of one of the founders and the founder doesn&#x27;t have the modesty to actually sell to users&#x2F;potential employees. That at a lot of startups there is friction between the founders that puts the product in danger because they have equal-ish power but between them lack a coherent vision for the future.<p>And a lot of these companies with bad foundations have brilliant founders. Just because companies are founded by smart people doesn&#x27;t mean they have a strong foundation. That is something we should be honest about. This isn&#x27;t to say that it doesn&#x27;t take luck, but there is a lot that helps to get right that a lot of startups aren&#x27;t getting right off the bat.
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callmeedalmost 11 years ago
<i>&gt; And then they find out that success in the start-up realm is mostly luck. They discover this by trying great ideas coupled with great execution and failing.</i><p>While I believe this (the luck part), I&#x27;m not sure most startup folks do. Or, there is at least some severe cognitive dissonance going on when they begin to discover it.<p>Even &quot;the pivot&quot; itself was made popular by The Lean Startup–the book that many take as the <i>formula</i> for startup success (very much the antithesis of luck).<p>Yes, you have to hustle. Yes, you have to build something people want. Yes, you should have an awesome team. When you combine all those things <i>and still fail</i>, most people will blame something besides just luck. (&quot;I couldn&#x27;t get funding&quot;, &quot;Google changed their algorithm&quot;, &quot;I couldn&#x27;t hire the right person for X&quot;)<p>Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can&#x27;t code as good as you and didn&#x27;t go to as good a school as you–then it was <i>most definitely luck</i>.
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wdewindalmost 11 years ago
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 :)
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devindotcomalmost 11 years ago
If you remove the questionable assumption that most of the ideas are good, isn&#x27;t it rather kind of institutionalizing &quot;throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick?&quot;
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noname123almost 11 years ago
Man can&#x27;t wait for someone to build a pivoting web framework on Github, where I can build a subscription based service and then switch whatever the product is with the data schema, and the pricing and the description page changes.<p>Basically a framework that already has Stripe&#x2F;Paypal payment integration to charge a user&#x27;s CC, a schema for a informational or subscription-based product that I can modify pricing and description for, and some front-end templates to modify the landing page and call to action and A&#x2F;B testing analytics for me to optimize on conversion.<p>Kinda of like A&#x2F;B testing but hedging my bets and executing all of my business ideas at once!
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aresantalmost 11 years ago
&quot;Building a product for the Internet is now the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard part.&quot;<p>This feels like a meta-Dilbert joke about how business guys perceive technology &amp; development.<p>As if the &quot;product&quot; is somehow separated from &quot;getting people to understand. . . and use it&quot;
e40almost 11 years ago
<i>Success simply can&#x27;t be predicted to any level of statistical comfort.</i><p>There are, however, a small percentage of people that consistently succeed. I met a guy like this, and I came to find out he had eliminated a lot of the risk of his software ventures by having a ready-made market for his company among his friends in the venture&#x2F;banking world. I saw him do it a few times and realized that it was cheating, in a sense. I could replicate the first N-1 steps he did, but that last one required an <i>in</i> with the right crowd, which I didn&#x27;t have.
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natural219almost 11 years ago
This is a great blog post, but I want to point out that this is not a new idea, just a way to express an old idea using new terms (&quot;pivot&quot;, &quot;startups&quot;, etc.)<p>What Scott is trying to express is that, in a capitalist economy, money is the goal. The process of getting money, once technical innovation is subtracted, is called Marketing. The process of doing Marketing is to understand psychology -- given a set of craftable stimuli, how can you influence the ape to swipe her credit card.
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crawshawalmost 11 years ago
This notion of commodity technology doesn&#x27;t apply to every startup. Boston Dynamics was not a company slapping together commodity technology and testing user behavior.<p>But it does apply to a lot of startups. And that&#x27;s why I work for a big company, because I&#x27;m here for long-term big change, not fashion and profit.
haomiaoalmost 11 years ago
What the author (and really everyone in the Valley) is referring to as &quot;luck&quot; is that fundamentally the whole process is stochastic: there&#x27;s an unavoidable randomness. Probability is involved. Now, mini rant here: whenever people talk about something being random there&#x27;s a sense that it&#x27;s COMPLETELY random: the probability distribution is uniform and anything can happen. Lottery tickets, throwing dice, flipping coins. And, not to put too fine a point on it, that is COMPLETELY, UTTERLY WRONG.<p>Saying there&#x27;s probabilistic uncertainty in something doesn&#x27;t mean the distributions are uniform. It just means given all the inputs you can&#x27;t always predict all the outputs. No matter what you do, no matter what happens, the result can be one of many things. 1 or 0. Success or failure.<p>This doesn&#x27;t mean you can&#x27;t DO SOMETHING about it though, and that&#x27;s precisely what people are doing. Figure out the patterns, cut through the uncertainty, and try to find your way to the promised land.<p>What the author&#x27;s describing using the language of social science and valley speak is the same thing that the machine learning&#x2F;AI&#x2F;robotics community learned in the past few decades. They started out with formal logics and rigid rules, and they learned that to succeed in a random world, you have to embrace the randomness. Build it deeply into your systems and processes and all of a sudden you start performing better than your wildest expectations.<p>Model, measure, evaluate, pivot, repeat. That&#x27;s pretty damn familiar. What&#x27;s it describing? A closed loop control system. Change the terminology a bit and you&#x27;re talking about a Kalman filter with a feedback controller. What&#x27;s a learning algorithm but a way to fit patterns to noisy, partially random data?<p>And that&#x27;s what this is all about. Luck doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s all random, just that you can&#x27;t control everything. And being good doesn&#x27;t mean you eliminate the randomness, it means finding the patterns and making randomness work for you.<p>Is there randomness in poker? Sure. Of course. But there&#x27;s a shit ton of skill too (I know, because I don&#x27;t have any of it). Don&#x27;t confuse a poker game for a game of dice.
Spearchuckeralmost 11 years ago
In 2010 Ross Anderson pointed out (stated rather emphatically actually) that security is driven by only two things - psychology and economics. Software is no different.<p>Security Engineering - <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B004BDOZI0/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1402956046&amp;sr=8-2&amp;pi=SL75" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;gp&#x2F;aw&#x2F;d&#x2F;B004BDOZI0&#x2F;ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qi...</a>
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nbarryalmost 11 years ago
It reminds me of Jim Collins&#x27; concept (not original to him, I know) of shooting lots of little bullets and seeing which one hits, rather than wasting gunpowder on one big cannonball before you&#x27;re even sure you&#x27;re aimed in the right direction.<p>Except he mostly used that concept to describe how companies decide which individual products or strategies to focus on, while the idea of a pivot is that you shift your entire company to do something else. (Reminds me of another Collins metaphor - it&#x27;s important to get the right people on the bus first, and then you can decide together where to drive.)
JoeAltmaieralmost 11 years ago
The internet is a psychology experiment? Well, maybe a tiny fraction of it. You know, those spammy pages where they promise something amazing if only you&#x27;ll enter your email address.<p>I&#x27;m not sure we need more of that. Its like someone pretending to sell brushes wanting in your house, who keeps glancing around casing the joint while blathering some spiel.<p>As a model for qualifying internet product plans, its going to suffer from self-selection of the customers - you know, those lonely people who will talk to anybody, even a brush salesman, and will tell them anything they want to hear.
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silverlakealmost 11 years ago
Consumer internet startups are like Hollywood entertainment. No one knows what TV shows or movies will be successful. The industry tries to make smart bets: invest in big name directors or actors, or sequels or copycats or cheap reality shows, but it&#x27;s still a gamble. Successful shows come out of nowhere. So they keep trying random shows every season and see which ones stick. Doesn&#x27;t this sound like Silicon Valley?
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klungeralmost 11 years ago
This phenomenon was identified in the academic literature on entrepreneurship some time ago. It is called &quot;effectuation&quot;. This site has a decent explanation of why and how it occurs: <a href="http://effectuation.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;effectuation.org&#x2F;</a>
burntealmost 11 years ago
Here&#x27;s my problem with Scott Adams: he thinks he&#x27;s a lot more clever than he really is, and he is down right smarmy about it. I&#x27;ve been in the dot-com start up pressure cooker, I&#x27;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&#x27;t have to, but it did. We had great people and a solid foundation, but needed to reorient. We didn&#x27;t due to management, and it went tits up in no time. Tens of millions of dollars flushed down the toilet. The one I&#x27;m part of now, we&#x27;ve only spent a little over $100k, and after a couple setbacks, we&#x27;re realizing a pivot is needed, but one that actually will save the core of the company and make it more successful.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>What these startups are doing is realizing they have an idea that for whatever reason, they can&#x27;t pull off. Maybe it&#x27;s a bad idea, maybe it&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Oh, and the Internet IS a technology, it&#x27;s one that enables many things, like psychological&#x2F;market experiments, but it&#x27;s still a technology. Don&#x27;t think so hard next time, Scott. You&#x27;ll hurt yourself.
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trhwayalmost 11 years ago
&gt;building product X and selling the company to Google for a billion dollars.<p>Oh no! it was my secret business plan which i have for several years been working on in my mind during all these hard-to-stay-awake afternoon hours in my cubicle ... opsss... at my desk at highly collaborative (ie. noisy) and innovative (no sane person would do such a space for him&#x2F;herself) open space at BigCo-s
golergkaalmost 11 years ago
&gt; Every entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade. The ONLY thing that matters to success in our anything-is-buildable Internet world is psychology. How does the customer perceive this product? What causes someone to share? What makes virality happen? What makes something sticky?<p>That sounds like marketing, not psychology. Of course, marketing is heavily relying on psychology, but still.
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aleemalmost 11 years ago
Pivot as per the blog post seems to be a mix of extending, innovating and leveraging what you have. I am not bothered by the exact strategy since the concepts are all relevant.<p>Before the word pivot was being bandied about, Microsoft had Hotmail and Hotmail had something like 200 million users (over decade ago).<p>Microsoft released a Hotmail notifier that got prime real estate in your system tray (next to the clock). Most companies knew that the the system tray and the desktop were both prime real estate. The Hotmail Notifier tray icon solved a genuine problem: users knew right away if new mail had arrived.<p>In a future release the Hotmail notifier got extended to a chat application: MSN Messenger. Since Hotmail had lots of users, it managed to take over ICQ and AOL fairly quickly. MSN Messenger tried hard to market other services and products via a constantly displaying ad unit.<p>Messenger then assigned a blog to every user that could be activated within a few clicks. A new blog post by a user would be indicated by a star (internally they were referred to as &quot;gleams&quot;). I recall Microsoft claimed to have become the largest blogging network shortly thereafter though this was probably a numbers game because very few were active bloggers. Microsoft also had other ambitions such as Passport, Shopping, etc but they failed to translate&#x2F;convert users from the chat window to the browser window.<p>I am not sure if either of those scenarios qualify as pivots in the classical sense. MSN outlived Hotmail though not for long. Passport got mixed reception. MSN shopping didn&#x27;t take off but Microsoft threw a lot of things out there, hoping something would stick. This is also what Scott&#x27;s post seems to suggest though I am not sure if this is such a great idea as its costly. MSN has made a loss in nearly every quarter.<p>One observation I drew from this is that if you have passive users, you can do a lot more with them. Social browsing is passive (chat, FB and even email back when chain mails and mail groups didn&#x27;t face competition from Orkut or Facebook walls). You can throw games, videos, pictures and interest-based activities like restaurants and reviews at passive users. Mail is not a passive medium anymore. That&#x27;s why Google Drive seems to make sense only some of the time, when I need to collaborate on Google Docs. At other times, it gets in the way, for example, when I want to download certain attachments.<p>Active users rarely deviate from their goal. This would be mostly Google Search users who want to complete the goal of finding something as quickly as possible. These users are definitely much harder to funnel into other services.<p>To capitalise on active users it seems that innovation is key. Google search added the calculator, conversions, weather, scoreboards, etc. I suppose the pivot here is using the search box as user-friendly command line sans the strict syntax. However, forcing these users down a different funnel such as Google+ didn&#x27;t work well.
spektomalmost 11 years ago
From my experience, pivoting does not motivate people who work for a start-up on a salary basis. Once you&#x27;ve made something, which you start liking, your bosses (start-up founders) tell you that they are going to pivot to a different direction. That simply drives away any sense of satisfaction by the work you&#x27;ve done.
peterwwillisalmost 11 years ago
So, at a basic level, a pivot is just a field experiment without a control? Or is it an observational study?
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ejainalmost 11 years ago
There&#x27;s a difference between pivoting to a random new exciting idea when the previous idea doesn&#x27;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.
mhartlalmost 11 years ago
I wonder if there&#x27;s a way for startups to systematize Adams&#x27;s insight that &quot;[e]very entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade&quot; by hiring professional psychologists.
drb311almost 11 years ago
Software can now provide just about any user experience quite easily, so the software industry is now all about figuring out what experiences people want. Is that all he&#x27;s saying?
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cpncrunchalmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;m a little disappointed...I expected to see a cartoon.
deisneralmost 11 years ago
Pied Piper needs to pivot: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA</a>
drivingmenutsalmost 11 years ago
&quot;quality is less important than speed&quot;<p>So, we&#x27;re producing crap ... but it&#x27;s really quick crap quickly crapped.
yiedyiealmost 11 years ago
TL;DR<p>&gt; <i>Internet is no longer a technology. The Internet is a psychology experiment.</i>
MichaelMoser123almost 11 years ago
it has something to do with psychology; it seems that companies that do an ICQ like messenger are going to make it big; Skype, whatsapp, facebook, you get the idea.
triplesecalmost 11 years ago
do remember that this guy is a comedian... so this I see as pithy satire more than actual analysis. As such it&#x27;s pretty good
dueprocessalmost 11 years ago
It doesn&#x27;t sound like a psychology experiment Scott is talking about, but a &quot;stumble-upon&quot; strategy. Psychology is a little more elegant than just pivot, pivot, pivot.
matznerdalmost 11 years ago
does anyone else think his site design looks similar to youtube?