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.
Panasonic started out making lightbulb sockets.
Mitsubishi started as a shipping company.
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.
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.
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.
The Nokia plc we all know mostly focuses on wired and wireless network technology.
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!
In this post-mortem talk [0] on Diablo 1. The creator mentioned his worst business decision - the Hotmail guy offering 10% of the company in return for an office in the back they weren't even using, and he rejected it.
According to him, the pitch was: "I'm going to make email over the Internet".
His response: "Dude, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard! What are you talking about, I already have my email over the Internet - this isn't even an invention!".
14 months later, that 10% was worth $40 million. Meanwhile they agreed to do Diablo only for $300k for Blizzard, and that was a bad deal - they even had to find more contracts to compensate it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com
Ahh.. never knew that's where the name comes from.
https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivo...
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
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
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...
― Norman Vincent Peale
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.
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
Plaid then got a 2021 round of $425MM at a $13.4B valuation “according to a person familiar with the matter”. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/07/plaid-hits-13point4-billion-...
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.
But it was after their Flickr exit, so they were basically doing what they wanted for a while.
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:
It started as an MMO? I never knew this and have got to go read about it now, that IS an interesting pivot.
Stewart Butterfield previously tried to make a game that eventually became flickr.
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.").
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.
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.
They basically started on the billing system for their VR and decided to pivot to that.
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.
https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Discord#:~:text=Advertisemen....
I think play, especially at work, isn't discussed or considered enough and can form a strong core of a good product ("focus on the fun rather than the money") [0]. If a product evokes good feelings, especially if it is being used in an otherwise drab 'setting' ("I need to talk to other people"), people will gravitate towards it over others that don't.
I can't think of a person who is overjoyed to use, say, Microsoft Teams but you will almost certainly find people who love Slack or Discord to the point of pushing their leads to use them.
[0]: https://www.thegamer.com/sid-meier-games-should-focus-on-fun...
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 just never got to that part, so it's arguable if it's a pivot.
Edit: it was even earlier than they actually added an exchange – these days it was just a custodial wallet.
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.
Having heard of the racehorse and not the company, this sentence tripped me up a bit
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.
Can you talk more about this?
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.
It also wasn’t obvious.
Years later some of the founders founded XKL to make a PDP-10 clone.
Most notable one was probably Grubwithus (meet people over meals) -> GOAT (sneakers marketplace, valued at $3.7B)
Zimride (college carpool) → Lyft Grubwithus (shared meals) → GOAT Meerkat (Twitter livestream) → Houseparty Fates Forever (iPad MOBA game) → Discord The Lobby (finance recruiting) → Nuvocargo
Zimride to Lyft isn't much of a pivot, they're basically kinda the same thing.
https://www.nokianfootwear.com/ https://www.nokiantyres.com/
If you've got a Japanese coworker who likes traveling from Japan to your area, or a remailer service you trust, Nintendo sells a mahjong set on their spare parts store in Japan.
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.
In January 1998 the Company changed its name to Alternative Entertainment,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, andINTERNET-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...)
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
Also Slack was a MMORPG for something like 3-4 years before they gave up on it and pivoted to being a chat app.
https://venturebeat.com/business/how-segment-survived-its-br...
Try to build X
fail
Build one of the shovels you needed to build X
succeed!
> In 1962, Warren Buffett began buying stock in Berkshire Hathaway after noticing a pattern in the price direction of its stock whenever the company closed a mill. Eventually, Buffett acknowledged that the textile business was waning and the company's financial situation was not going to improve. In 1964, Stanton made an oral tender offer to buy back Buffett's stake in the company for $11 1⁄2 per share. Buffett agreed to the deal. A few weeks later, Warren Buffett received the tender offer in writing, but the tender offer was for only $11 3⁄8. Buffett later admitted that this lower, undercutting offer made him angry. Instead of selling at the slightly lower price, Buffett decided to buy more of the stock to take control of the company and fire Stanton (which he did).
The Oracle of Omaha's first big move was driven, in part, by his desire to settle a grudge!
Lego _was_ a carpentry making wooden toys (not bricks, that concept came from another company: Kiddicraft toy company founded by Hilary Fisher Page). They acquired a very expensive plastic injection moulding machine. They spend several years working on the "Automatic Binding Brick" before nailing it down. By the time the wooden toy warehouse caught fire in the 1960s, the LEGO system was already -by far- the biggest selling product line of the company. Wooden toys were simply discontinued, not a pivot.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/lego-group/the-lego-group...
PS: Plastic toys were held in low regard when they started experimenting with it.
Pivot story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-16558
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.
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)