Pivots

When Glitch failed, the team realised the internal chat tool they had built to make a remote game studio work was the only thing customers actually wanted. They open-sourced the game and shipped the chat.

The same pattern, an earlier era. Game Neverending wasn't working; the photo-sharing module the team had built for in-game inventory was. Yahoo bought Flickr a year after launch.

When Apple shipped podcasts in iTunes, Odeo was dead. During a hackathon, Jack pitched a side project: short status updates broadcast to a small group. Evan Williams later bought back Odeo's assets from investors and let the team keep building Twitter.

The original tagline asked people to upload video introductions of themselves. Nobody did. The team kept the upload infrastructure and dropped the dating premise; the first non-dating video was Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.

Burbn had thousands of users using nothing but the photo feature. The team cut every other feature in eight weeks and re-launched. They hit a million users sixty days later.

Tobi gave up on every existing e-commerce package and built his own. Friends started asking to use it. Within two years he had stopped selling snowboards and started selling the platform.

Confinity's first product let Palm Pilot owners beam encrypted IOUs to each other. The web port — emailing money instead of beaming it — became the entire company within a year.

Tote let women shop their favourite stores from a phone. It mostly didn't work. But the team noticed users were emailing themselves images of products to remember them. They built an app for that instead.

The Point's quorum mechanic was perfect for one specific use case: getting strangers together to claim a bulk discount. The first Groupon was for half-price pizzas at a restaurant in Andrew's office building.

Nintendo spent eighty years as a playing-card company before grandson Hiroshi tried — and failed — at instant rice, taxis, and short-stay love hotels. The toy R&D arm he tolerated as a side bet eventually swallowed the company.

For its first fifteen years Starbucks didn't sell drinks — only beans, grinders, and brewing kit. Howard Schultz joined as marketing director, went to a Milan housewares fair in 1983, and came back obsessed with espresso. The owners refused to add drinks. Schultz left, founded Il Giornale, and bought the original Starbucks back in 1987 for $3.8M.

Netflix shipped its first DVD by mail in 1998 — a copy of Beetlejuice. For its first decade the company was a logistics business with warehouses and red envelopes. Streaming launched in 2007 as a free perk for DVD subscribers. By 2011 Hastings tried to spin DVDs off as 'Qwikster'; the backlash was so severe he reversed within three weeks. The streaming product quietly became the company.

The 2015 launch flopped. The team ran out of money, all the engineers but Simon Last quit, and Ivan and Simon moved to Kyoto and slept on a friend's apartment floor for a year. From there they rebuilt Notion from scratch around a single primitive — the flexible block. The 2016 relaunch was the product the world knows.

Hammer & Chisel built a mobile MOBA. To make it playable they had to ship a voice-chat system, because TeamSpeak, Mumble, and Skype were terrible. The game flopped. The voice chat the team had been using internally for two years felt better than anything else on the market — they spun it out as Discord in May 2015.

Justin.tv launched in 2007 as a continuous lifecast of Justin Kan's life via a head-mounted camera, then opened up to anyone within a year. By 2010 a category called Gaming had quietly emerged inside the site; in June 2011 the team spun those streams off as Twitch.tv. By 2014 gaming had eclipsed everything else; they shut down Justin.tv, renamed the parent Twitch Interactive, and sold to Amazon for $970M.

By 2014 the consumer check-in had peaked at 50 million users and never produced a real revenue model. The company split: Swarm absorbed the social check-ins, while Foursquare's location-data engine was opened up as an API. Apple, Twitter, Snapchat, and Uber all became customers. The B2B side eclipsed the consumer side; the API is now the company.

Sakichi Toyoda invented the world's first automatic loom in 1924. Five years later he sold the international patent to Britain's Platt Brothers for £100,000 — and used the proceeds to fund his son Kiichiro's automotive division. Toyota Motor Co. was incorporated in 1937. The family changed the romanisation from Toyoda to Toyota partly because the latter required eight strokes in katakana — a luckier number.

Lee Byung-chul founded Samsung — meaning 'three stars' — in 1938 in Daegu with 30,000 won. The trading firm survived the Korean War, diversified into sugar, textiles, retail, and insurance, and didn't enter electronics until 1969 with a black-and-white television co-venture with Sanyo. Within thirty years it was the largest tech company on the planet by revenue.

Nokia spent its first century as paper, then merged in 1967 with Finnish Rubber Works (boots, tyres) and Finnish Cable Works (cables, electronics). The combined Nokia made everything from gas masks to gumboots to televisions to lavatory paper. In 1992 a new CEO, Jorma Ollila, made the bet to focus on a single product: mobile phones. Eight years later Nokia was the largest phone maker on Earth.

Ole Kirk Christiansen was a Danish carpenter who started carving wooden toys after his cabinetry workshop failed in the Depression. The factory burned down in 1924, 1942, and 1960. After the 1942 fire he switched to plastic injection moulding, which had only just become available in postwar Europe. The first interlocking 'Automatic Binding Bricks' shipped in 1949. The patent for the modern stud-and-tube design didn't arrive until 1958.

Five investors formed 3M in 1902 to mine corundum in Two Harbors, Minnesota. The corundum turned out to be low-grade and almost worthless. To save the company, they pivoted to making sandpaper from imported abrasive. From there: waterproof sandpaper for the auto industry (1921), Scotch masking tape (1925), Scotch transparent tape (1930), Scotchgard (1953), and Post-it Notes (1980 — invented by an engineer who had been trying to make a stronger adhesive and accidentally made a weaker one).

The original Hugging Face was a teen-targeted conversational app — an AI you'd chat with for fun. It worked. The NLP infrastructure the team built underneath it worked even better. In 2018 they open-sourced their PyTorch port of Google's BERT model and renamed the library Transformers. Within a year it was the dominant way researchers and engineers worked with language models. By 2020 the company had launched Datasets, Spaces, and the Hub — a GitHub-for-models — and the chatbot was a footnote.

Berkshire was a 19th-century New England textile firm that merged with Hathaway Manufacturing in 1955. By the early 1960s it was visibly dying. Warren Buffett started buying shares in 1962 because they were trading below book value. He took control in 1965 and used the corporate shell as his investment vehicle. He kept the failing mills running for twenty years out of guilt before finally shuttering them in 1985. He has called buying Berkshire his single worst investment ever — the opportunity cost ran into the hundreds of billions.