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Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

219 points by jd_illa ↗ HN
Someone on HN said Notion started as a research tool. Couldn't find info on that online, but it got me interested in thinking about unusual/interesting pivots. I've read about some of the big ones (Odeo --> Twitter, Tote --> Pinterest), but curious if anyone has more recent or lesser known ones.

203 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 3157 ms ] thread
tesseract
Game Neverending --> Flickr
jollybean
Then he started another game company which became Slack!
lucakiebel
The guy doesn’t sound like he’s that good at game companies, still should probably continue though
mxuribe
Unless...This is a mind trick that he uses to trick his mind into thinking that *this time* I'll really develop a game...and then fully expecting that something else will be created! I mean, some other creative people resort to all manner of tricks - like alcohol, weed, etc. - just to trigger the muse and serendipitous invention!
jollybean
That's the best 'company culture hack' ever.

Join out creative gaming company!

(But really we're going to sell SaaS against Microsoft, I'm just not honest with myself yet!)

mxuribe
There will have to be a chapter devoted to this topic in my (fictional) book: "A Dictator's Guide: Your Next Step After Being Fired from Corporate America for Being A Sociopath". ;-)
jollybean
They would never admit being that! Nor would they be fired for being a sociopath.

And the book already exists: "The Art of the Deal"

mxuribe
Good points on both counts! :-)
papreclip
maybe he's just tricking game devs into applying their work ethic to other product lines
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tagami
Glitch was an an amazing game the the explorer, social, and achiever archetypes. Wonderful narrative too
barrysteve
Games are a hotbed for new ideas. Like a sandbox, you are challenged with making something fresh and new just to justify being there.
eps
It was called Glitch and it was super dorky.

But it was after their Flickr exit, so they were basically doing what they wanted for a while.

hnsanket
Discord was probably supposed to be a gaming company but now it's a lot more than something related to just gaming
bjord
pretty sure the discord as a whole was a pivot away from a video game (I believe they extracted the chat feature they'd built for the game and ran with that)
emptysea
I think that’s actually the Slack origin story you’re thinking of, but honestly discord could have the same origin.
pnw
Slack and Discord have a lot in common. Both were the founders second attempt at a game company that morphed into a chat platform.

Jason previously founded Aurora Feint, which became the social platform OpenFeint, acquired by Gree.

palijer
This is a pretty decent list if you are interested in the concept and looking for examples.

https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivo...

jd_illa
hah curious about soylent
joegahona
Thank you for sharing this -- I didn't realize this existed. Instagram is covered in your link, and you can hear about it from the founder in this really good Lex Fridman podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pvpNKUPbIY

These lists always kind of remind me of popular bands that changed music over time. The most drastic "pivot" I've ever come across in a known band is Ministry, who went from a benign new-wave Depeche Mode clone in 1983 [1] to a pseudo-Cabaret Voltaire in 1986 [2], then to full-on metal by 1991 [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VFqVRepm6U

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mui0sj-kxLY

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYYGKCanqfA

yesenadam
Thanks, the Ministry evolution was funny, and made me think of this comparably drastic one:

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (1959) [0] to Live-Evil (1971) [1] to Rated X (1974) [2]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAxefAW4J1g

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sDYPbiwMA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrjFtbGKqFk

joegahona
This is bonkers -- I don't really follow/listen to jazz, but was aware of "So What" and the other Miles Davis standards -- I had no idea he went this direction. Was he just stretching the genre as far as possible at this point? The "genre-stretching" thing is something I've been thinking about lately and trying to identify -- the band Swans has done this convincingly imo with rock, especially with the 2013 album "To Be Kind."
yesenadam
Hi :-) What genre? ..jazz?! I don't think of those second two as jazz. People play music, not genres. They and their music just have to be labelled to put in bins in record stores I guess. Some other Miles "directions":

classical/flamenco (1960) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38zRx9AYDHQ

latin/bossanova (1963) https://youtu.be/PnCg05hrBWs?t=1089

guitar-based rock (1970) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up9yWDl0jBc

funk (1972) https://youtu.be/AIqXprCArdo?t=1520

Others e.g. Bitches Brew (1970), In a Silent Way (1969), are totally different again from these.

quartz
Segment was a wildly successful one (with a big exit). They started out as an education tool startup.

Also Slack was a MMORPG for something like 3-4 years before they gave up on it and pivoted to being a chat app.

rmason
The Segment crew tried a couple of ideas without any success. Segment was an open source project that they wrote for one of the startup ideas and it had much more success. They weren't in agreement but the partners didn't have any better ideas, they were down to the last of their capital so they launched a commercial version of their open source.

https://venturebeat.com/business/how-segment-survived-its-br...

gumby
Cisco is a famous example. They were founded to build a clone of the beloved PDP-10 mainframe. To bring in some cash they made copies of the stanford LAN routers the team had designed and built at Stanford. Turns out a lot of people wanted networking gear.

Years later some of the founders founded XKL to make a PDP-10 clone.

pinewurst
Which in turn pivoted to optical networking equipment. ;)
gumby
Well by that point the market for PDP-10s was pretty much nil.
k4ch0w
Slack, MMO to Chat client is probably the most interesting and stark pivot
dvtrn
Slack? The chat app that everyone has very strongly held opinions on? that slack?

It started as an MMO? I never knew this and have got to go read about it now, that IS an interesting pivot.

bink
IIRC some of the animated characters that show up with error messages are from the old game.
preommr
Not even the first time that happened.

Stewart Butterfield previously tried to make a game that eventually became flickr.

sjg1729
And discord was split off from a LoL-like game when it turned out to be the best part about it
suoduandao2
It's fun to imagine what would happen if Stewart Butterfield was given the rights to Half-life 3...
JoeAltmaier
In the very old days Phar Lap made a compiler. They ran out of room in 64K so they wrote the DOS Extender. It was a far more popular tool than their compiler, so they sold that, for a decade, from 1986 until Win95 came out with 32-bit support.

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.

yen223
> "In the very old days Phar Lap made a compiler"

Having heard of the racehorse and not the company, this sentence tripped me up a bit

BryantD
Man, memories. I worked for Phar Lap for, I dunno, a few months. Cool place.
650REDHAIR
Firebase started as a chat widget/plugin for websites.
joshribakoff
Brex went from virtual reality goggles -> corporate finance saas

They basically started on the billing system for their VR and decided to pivot to that.

jd_illa
wow i totally didn't know about this -- that's hilarious.
pedalpete
Was it googles? I thought they were building a development environment in VR. But I can't find any reference.
enos_feedler
Google is such a behemoth it is taking over adjacent words
ignoramous
That doesn't fit the usual definition of a pivot though (unlike in the case of Slack / Hotmail noted above).
rickyyean
My friend Jason wrote this Tweet with 5 examples I don't think gets talked about much: https://twitter.com/JasonShen/status/1560680372463173637

Most notable one was probably Grubwithus (meet people over meals) -> GOAT (sneakers marketplace, valued at $3.7B)

jasonshen
Thanks Ricky! Yeah the 5 I wrote about are:

Zimride (college carpool) → Lyft Grubwithus (shared meals) → GOAT Meerkat (Twitter livestream) → Houseparty Fates Forever (iPad MOBA game) → Discord The Lobby (finance recruiting) → Nuvocargo

bombcar
If you add blank lines between you'll get them formatted more like what you probably want.

Zimride to Lyft isn't much of a pivot, they're basically kinda the same thing.

jasonshen
Oops, thanks for the catch re: the spaces. Looks like I can't edit the comment anymore though.

That said, I'd say going from a SaaS model where you charge companies or universities $40k/year to access software that they provide free to students/workers is very different from a mobile app that does real-time dispatch / pickup inside a city and you charge the consumer directly. Different customer, different business model, different offering.

sshine
MtGox, the infamous Bitcoin exchange that handled over 70% of the Bitcoin trading volume of 2010 was originally "Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange", a site for trading magic cards in MtG: Online. I don't know if it's that wild of a pivot, trading one virtual object and then trading another, but magic cards sure seem more innocuous.
ak_111
Actually Nintendo started (140 years ago!) also as card trading company before becoming a console giant
tristor
It's even more interesting than that. Nintendo was created shortly after Japan made it no longer illegal to manufacturer or play card games (seen as something from the West to be banned). They started creating original card and board games, as well as card designs. They focused on playing cards, not necessarily trading cards, though. The entire business was able to exist or started due to government regulations and a partial lift.

Sort of unrelated, but Japanese companies have a history of convincing Disney to do things they'd otherwise never do. Nintendo famously got a license to use Disney characters on their playing cards in the 1950s... something nobody else was able to do, and it was one of their most lucrative lines. Square Enix managed to convince Disney to license their IP for use in Kingdom Hearts, which is bizarre in numerous ways for the Disney MO, and it turned into something incredible. Studio Ghibli famously managed to prevent Disney from destroying it's films when released in the US by pulling a power play (they sent a samurai sword to Harvey Weinstein... yes that Harvey with a note that just said "No cuts.").

er4hn
> Studio Ghibli famously managed to prevent Disney from destroying it's films when released in the US by pulling a power play (they sent a samurai sword to Harvey Weinstein... yes that Harvey with a note that just said "No cuts.").

What's worth noting here is this was in response to a very bad cut of "Nausicaa Valley of the Wind", which is the studios first movie and where their name comes from.

WastingMyTime89
> Studio Ghibli famously managed to prevent Disney from destroying it's films when released in the US by pulling a power play (they sent a samurai sword to Harvey Weinstein... yes that Harvey with a note that just said "No cuts.").

Well the power play is more that they put a clause in their distribution contract with Disney saying they had to agree to any cuts after the botched release of their previous films and simply said no to every cuts Weinstein asked for.

Apparently, Toshiro Suzuki personally offered the replica sword to Weinstein during a Miramax meeting while yelling "Mononoke Hime, NO CUT!" because Disney didn't respect the contract while distributing Kiki Delivery Service.

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fakethenews2022
I really dislike these stories because virtually all these companies lose the script (no second act). It seems that companies that start with a larger vision have multiple acts. Microsoft with software going from programming tools to OS to office to cloud. Apple with computing going from computers to iPods, phones, and tablets. Google with organizing the worlds information and making it accessible. Perhaps it is survival bias or perhaps I am mistaken.
ghaff
I'm not sure Microsoft had such a grand vision early on; they were late to the Internet after all. And their public cloud play came along later as well. Neither did Apple. And I'd say that Google went from organizing the world's information to mostly selling ads.
fakethenews2022
I would say that Google monetized organizing the world's information by selling ads. That is pretty exactly what they did with search and search ads.
ghaff
Except that they largely deprioritized things besides search because they couldn't monetize to the same degree. Google Reader, Scholar, Books (and yes I know there were legal issues), Deja News/Groups, etc. They continue to sort of support things like Blogger but they're clearly not a priority. To Google, the "world's information" is mostly restricted to information they can serve search ads against.
fakethenews2022
Agree but still a grand vision. Organizing the world's monetizable information and making it accessible.

They added the monetizable part later.

There has been other information besides the web that they have organized: YouTube.

ghaff
I don't really disagree. They narrowed their vision over time but did start out with a grand vision.
55555
It's also a little silly because every serial founder basically could have pivoted had they desired. It's just normally suboptimal for various reasons. Easier to shut it down and start anew.
hbrn
Plaid was originally a budgeting app. After realizing how terrible banking APIs are, they pivoted to building a developer-friendly banking API. Now their valuation is 10B+.
bot41
That is not that interesting. It's something everyone realizes when they try make a budgeting app. Plaid decided to break the rules to create a product. They collected end users authentication details and pretended to be them to scrape data from financial institutions.
shepherdjerred
Risking every penny I own by trusting credentials with Plaid is a worthwhile trade off for having to deal with my bank’s website less.
Xcelerate
So what goes wrong with budgeting apps? Sounds like there would be a huge market for personal (or small business) finance, targeting traditional CPA/CFP approaches.
1270018080
My dumb guess: The people financially-conscious enough to budget aren't the ones willing to pay for a budgeting service.
bombcar
And everyone wants one customized for their exact setup. Excel works and wins.
kulor
I can't find sources but having made a budgeting app in the past have first-hand experience from being in the domain.

Small businesses are well catered for with tools like Xero, QuickBooks etc.

There's a psychological issue of people treating their budgeting app as the bearer of bad news (shooting the messenger effect), which results in churn.

There's also a high correlation between people looking for budgeting solutions being in a bad financial standing which makes the justification of paying for the software less likely.

bjrobz
Air BNB

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:

https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo

bze12
that doesn't really seem like a pivot, moreso a big expansion of their original niche
bjrobz
Yea, the story is still interesting, how they chose that path. Highly recommend watching the link i provided.
rparmar
This is perhaps the best talk I've ever heard on startups, ever. Chesky is such a good story teller and Reid Hoffman is such a great interviewer. I think a lot of founders would benefit from watching this.
swyx
narrative fallacy is a cruel master though.
swyx
I mean if we're going with Airbnb then might as well mention Uber's pivot from black car service to ridesharing (along with new CEO.. basically rebooting the company)
scrollaway
Didn't youtube start off as a dating website?
mtmail
Maybe you're mixing that up with Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg started FaceMash to compare students in a 'hot or not' type website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#FaceMash
rmason
Nope, YouTube really did start out as a dating site where you could record videos. Quite simply it didn't work very well. They pivoted and history was made.

Others had tried earlier with the same idea but the pieces weren't in place. Plus being members of the PayPal mafia they knew how to execute.

jayceedenton
Nokia:

Toilet Paper -> Rubber Boots -> Electronics

killvenom
Netscape started as a virtual conference room back in the 90s before they had to scale it back to just a browser.

Twitch aka JustinTV, at one point the founding team tried to sell coffee tables with your blog post of choice printed on it.

jasode
Brian Armstrong pivoted from "payments enabler for Bitcoin" (Bitbank) -- to -- "cryptocurrencies exchange" (Coinbase) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815403

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".

nl
I think you are being downvoted because you pretty clearly need to build the exchange to make the payment thing work.

They just never got to that part, so it's arguable if it's a pivot.

55555
I listened to Armstrong on Lex Fridman lately. He was originally trying to simply build a bitcoin storage website (a ‘bitbank’). Then he added a buy button and people started using it, but even this did not initially require creating an order book / full exchange. It was a proper pivot by the sound of it.
notpushkin
They actually got to that part pretty early on I think. They had a feature that allowed businesses to accept crypto through them and receive plain old fiat payouts to the bank account. It's still there nowadays, too: https://commerce.coinbase.com/

Edit: it was even earlier than they actually added an exchange – these days it was just a custodial wallet.

didgetmaster
It could depend on what is considered 'a pivot'. Some companies start out with grandiose plans only to find out that they don't have enough money or other resources to develop, market, and support 'Plan A'. So they take a piece of what they already have working and build a product around that to 'prime the pump'. Before they know it, the pump primer turns into 'Plan B' and they never get back to the original plan.

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

chrisfrantz
Our last company went that path. We planned to build one product, but first we had to build an initial feature set to support it. That initial feature saw early traction and we never got around to building the real product. Not a bad outcome for us, but we definitely were not able to realize the vision we had.
activitypea
I believe both Slack and Discord started developing video games, then realized the communication tools for large video game-scale teams aren't good enough.
obayesshelton
Slack is a great story.

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...

axit
Funny thing is this was the second time Stewart Butterfield tried to build a massively multiplayer game and pivoted the company. The first one was Flickr!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield

cercatrova
The man just wants to make MMOs but accidentally keeps creating billion dollar companies!
ErikAugust
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”

― Norman Vincent Peale

swivelmaster
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll be acquired by Yahoo!.”
rexreed
or SalesForce in the case of Slack
justusthane
Or, you know, come crashing back to earth at terminal velocity.
Ancapistani
That beats drifting out into deep space, alive but unable to do anything other than watch your life support system slowly but inevitably fail.
qikInNdOutReply
Reminds me of my brother, who wanted to have a little toy car consolation price at the christmas fair, but kept winning the main prices. Parents were chatting with another couple, he came asked for a buck to play, dumped the main price into my fathers arms, this went on six-times, he was almost crying by the point my father said "enough" the arm full of Dresden stollen. Sometimes your glorious victory is the defeat of others. Good times.
a_t48
This is what first came to mind for me - which is unfortunate because Glitch was fun and very chill. Too bad fun doesn't necessarily mean successful for MMOs.
paxys
In fact the gaming company had already failed. They shut down the product and laid off employees, and offered to return the remaining money to their investors. The investors instead said keep it and try building something else.

It wasn't a random pivot either. Real-time multiplayer gaming and real-time group chat share a lot of the same characteristics. Discord has the exact same origin story.

swyx
> Real-time multiplayer gaming and real-time group chat share a lot of the same characteristics

i mean... yes we have n=2 data but does that claim pass the sniff test? group chat is a lot easier graphics and physics and latency wise

qznc
Warren Buffet turned a textile manufacturing company into a holding.

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.

timr
Sharp started out making mechanical pencils.

Panasonic started out making lightbulb sockets.

Mitsubishi started as a shipping company.

blululu
Though I believe all these companies still make these products. They have simply expanded into other sectors.
timr
Sharp doesn't make mechanical pencils, so far as I know. I'd also be sort of surprised if Panasonic made lightbulb sockets.

To your broader point, though, it's true that most of the major Japanese conglomerates have amusing/modest origins and have accrued side-businesses over time until they became goliaths.

It's still interesting that a company like Panasonic began with something so mundane. Other than a few cases like IBM (which began as separate companies making time clocks and card punchers), it's not that common a story in the western market.

KerrAvon
I don’t think MS counts as a pivot. Those were all software products for early microcomputers.
jonnybgood
Lehman Brothers started as a dry-goods store.
manquer
Warren Buffet was always a investor he didn’t himself pivot anything.

He didn’t found Berkshire he just bought a old public not very healthy textile company and used it as his investment vehicle /holding company and dumped its assets.

55555
Yes all correct, just like the parent, but technically he did pivot the textile mill company into an investment company, even tho Warren Buffet himself didn't pivot (altho he's arguably pivoted a bit from his original investment strategy, but this a thread for large pivots).
manquer
Berkshire Hathaway the textile company died more than pivoted.

The kind of change that Berkshire Hathaway went through is fairly well used tool in finance. Every SPAC does the kind of the same for example, asset stripping and selling in parts or becoming a holding company is natural way for companies in late stage to die.[1]

Alphabet becoming a holding company is perhaps closer to a pivot for holding and operating companies than Berkshire

[1] A recent example would be Altaba that was created from the remnants of Yahoo.

indrora
Nokia still makes paper and rubber products.
Ndymium
Not that Nokia. Nokian Tyres plc (Nokian Renkaat Oyj) was split in the 80s and is the company making tires. Rubber boots were made by Nokian Footwear (Nokian Jalkineet), split in 1990 and nowadays a brand of Berner Oy. Paper products at Nokia (the city) are made by Nokian Paperi which is a part of Swedish company Essity.

The Nokia plc we all know mostly focuses on wired and wireless network technology.

Animats
BOYSTOYS.COM, which ran a strip club in San Francisco, pivoted to manufacturing antifreeze as GlyEco.

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.

buffet_overflow
Okay, wow. >> BoysToys.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation (the "Company"), was incorporated in the State of Delaware on April 21, 1997 under the name Wagg Corp.

     In January 1998 the Company changed its name to Alternative Entertainment,
Inc. (the same name of a Nevada corporation (identified below as "AEI-Nevada") previously established for the operation of the Company's business) and in December 1998 the Company's name was changed to BoysToys.com, Inc.

THE COMPANY'S BUSINESS The Company, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, RMA of San Francisco, Inc., a California corporation ("RMA") owns and operates an upscale gentlemen's club in San Francisco, California (the "Club") under the name, "Boys Toys Club." The Company originally intended to operate the Club through Boys Toys Cabaret Restaurants, Inc., a California corporation ("BTC Restaurants") that is currently a dormant corporation with no operations or assets. All assets and operations of BTC Restaurants have been assigned to RMA.

     The Company has the following subsidiaries: RMA, BTC Restaurants, and
Alternative Entertainment, Inc., a Nevada corporation ("AEI-Nevada") of which only RMA has any assets or operations.

INTERNET-RELATED MATTERS While the Company's name includes the ".com" moniker, this reflected the Company's original intention to pursue business activities involving the use of the internet. Currently, the Company has not had sufficient financial or managerial resources to pursue or develop any significant internet related business: (i) the Company has two internet Web Sites for the Company's public and investor relations (namely, Boystoys.com and Boystoysir.com, respectively) (the "Corporate Web Sites") and (ii) six sites that opened in October 1999 and which have remained in development only. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000931799/000108638...)

>> In November 2007, after the Company's emergence from bankruptcy in May 2007, the Company's Board of Directors voted to forego any further involvement in the adult entertainment industry. The Company has since decided to explore opportunities in the environmental emissions trading industry and the Company is now positioned itself as a developmental company in that industry. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000931799/000108638...)

matt3210
Agave was originally for data crunching in construction but there was just no way to get the data so it became an integration platform for all the various software.