Pivots are for the lucky. There's a better way.

Pivoting is when something rotates around a fixed point.<p>If you take the product you already built (your fixed point) and apply it to a different market, that's a pivot.<p>Pet Peave: If you rename your company and now it's doing something completely new with a new codebase, it's not a pivot, it's starting over!

High level concepts like this have their place, but what really makes or breaks a company is the hundreds of details that you have to get right. I'd love to see way more discussion of the details and less business guru pontification.

This really isn't a novel concept. It's called <i>adapting</i>, and every business must do it in order to survive.

Would you consider facebook's move to the news feed a "pivot"? They certainly changed the fundamental way you interact with the product and shifted its purpose (a directory of your friends vs. updates about what they are doing) Most tech businesses that has survived, one could make the argument, have "pivoted". No matter what you call it, it's just good business. A lot of people are calling the Stickybits move to turntable a "pivot" - but wasn't their purpose this entire time to create a new way for people to interact with media? Different interface, same purpose. Make stuff people want, right?

And I've thought the talk would've been on QSORT.

tldr; "Listen to your customers and try to make a big but not 180-degree change in direction. I'm going to call this a veer. I know of a company doing this, but I can't tell you the details. But they are awesome."

tldr; Don't start over unnecessarily. Try to listen to your customers and implement reasonable changes to satisfy important needs.

the story would be more educating with some more details. may be it's really 16 degrees pivot, how do we know.