Pivoting

He's referring to Loopt (and others I suppose) when he says <i>"The other companies built elaborate infrastructures: e.g they partnered with wireless carriers so that users’ locations could be tracked in the background without having to “check-in”."</i><p>This is the kind of mistake that burns so badly. You find yourself saying something like "You mean you just <i>ask them</i> to update their location manually and that works?"<p>It reminds me of when Ballmer was bragging about how sharing songs via WiFi on the Zune could get you a date. Then Steve Jobs recommended simply giving one earbud to the girl.<p>The differencing between trying to untie the The Gordian Knot and taking a sword to it.

#2 is a big one. If there's one HN ethos that I disagree with, it's the idea that a better engineered solution is always a better solution (full stop). Unless you have infinite time and developers, that's not true.

He hits on a powerful question: “If we were to start over today, would we build our product the same way we had so far?”

<i>2. The Bridge on the River Kwai syndrome.</i><p>How is this counteracted by asking whether they would build the product the same way were they to start over? It seems it would do the opposite: Bring all the warts to their attention and make them rewrite the code even though it works perfectly well.

What if your business is going pretty much like you expected? I am actually kind of stressed out that things are going smoothly, does that mean I am not finding the weakness in my business fast enough? Or are things actually going smoothly?

There's also the danger of pivoting too fast. Don't continually half-ass things without letting them bake and mature. Something's to be said about following through and executing your vision, right?

The startup that I work for started out as a video upload site. On a whim one of the developers added the ability to use an embed code instead of uploading a video from your computer. When that became popular, it got promoted more and more until now, where there isn't even the option of uploading your own videos anymore. I always thought that was a hell of a pivot.