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.
Naturally, the VCs asked: did you do it on company time? Did you communicate via the company's email system?
Nope, came the answer. We thought about that and built this email system to exchange messages while we worked on the product.
And the VCs eyes lit up: tell us more about this email system!
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
https://review.firstround.com/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Sh...
Years later some of the founders founded XKL to make a PDP-10 clone.
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.
https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Discord#:~:text=Advertisemen....
In other words, he pivoted from an idea analogous to Visa/PayPal/Stripe/etc -- to -- a forex exchange market and financial broker/custodian.
[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.]
EDIT ADD reply to: >because you pretty clearly need to build the exchange to make the payment thing work.
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 "order book" 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 ecommerce payments 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".
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.
Another is IBM which originally built analog census taking machines and cash registers, but "pivoted" into the emerging world of digital computers.
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.
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.
They basically started on the billing system for their VR and decided to pivot to that.
An automatic loom manufacture got turned into one of the biggest automobile companies: Toyota
Nokia was initially a pulp mill.
Microsoft initially sold a BASIC interpreter, then a Unix, then MS-DOS.
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. https://www.Didgets.com
Pivot story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-16558
Most notable one was probably Grubwithus (meet people over meals) -> GOAT (sneakers marketplace, valued at $3.7B)
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.
Also Slack was a MMORPG for something like 3-4 years before they gave up on it and pivoted to being a chat app.
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.
Try to build X
fail
Build one of the shovels you needed to build X
succeed!
https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivo...
Started as a tool for renting rooms in cities during conferences, where hosts were expected to provide no more than an air mattress.
Pivoted to full on house renting.
Chesky talks about it all here in the blitzscaling series, an interview series conducted by Reid Hoffman:
Toilet Paper -> Rubber Boots -> Electronics
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They also hired ~10 robotics people to reduce technician time and error for the workflow.
Now, they seem to only be selling the robotics. $100M market?
Unclear where all that bio IP went.
- Wheat flour
- Steel
- Saws
- Coffee grinders
- Corsets
- Bicycles
- Cars
You can still buy Peugeot grinders and bicycles.
Though isn't much of a pivot from moving goods to moving money.
Twitch aka JustinTV, at one point the founding team tried to sell coffee tables with your blog post of choice printed on it.
https://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/how-hard-could-it-be-t... (2006)