Pivot
Categories: Company Management
Things were going great in your drug company. You thought you were curing cancer. Until it became clear that...you weren't. And your drug caused serious anal leakage.
So you pivoted. And diluted the intensity by 2/3, and renamed your drug: ConstipationCure. You were going in Direction A, but then another, better opportunity came around, and you pivoted to head in Direction B.
World's most famous example of a pivot? Twitter. Twitter was making one form or another of corporate software. In order to communicate among the founders, it created the "Hey! Pay attention, Bob!" thing. It turned out that their corporate software thing was meh...but everyone in and around and adjunct to Twitter loved the hashtag thing, adopted it, and well, the rest is history.
Pivots are great when they work, but if you have to pivot, odds are really high that the pivot will just mask eventual death anyway. Some 97% of venture-backed companies die. So...#HaveBackups.
