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When we discover that our experiments have stopped being productive, Let us Pivot to a new
fundamental strategy, that'll allow us to better experiments. That's what a pivot is.
I was groping around for a way to describe a phenomenon that I kept seeing
in the start-ups I was working with so I wrote a blogpost,
I mean the blogpost, it wasn't, Like, 'coining the word Pivot' it just said Pivot don't jump
to a new vision
now i'm good at encapsulating it crisply A pivot is a change in strategy
without a change in vision
I show my slides now with a cartoon I saw,
I kid you not, in the new yorker magazine
There's a man and a woman sitting in an outdoor cafe and the caption below says
I'm not leaving you I'm pivoting to another man
so the work 'Pivot' is probably my most notorius contribution to the
the start-up vernacular
Here's the critical thing you gotta understand about the 'Pivot', and it's really very simple
you get in your car you don't boot-up your GPS and say GPS where do I want to go?
It doesn't know it's just a robot it helps you get where you want to go to.
The vision is the destination you have in mind
but if you run into an obstacle.
you don't just drive your car into the obstacle over and over again in the
hopes that it will be fine. You with the help of your GPS find a way around
OK, very simple startups that succeed all do that
really well. They start out with an idea that sounds good but turns out to be terrible
YouTube started-out as a dating site
and only after people were trying to upload all kinds of video did they make the pivot
to a video site. Flickr was an online video game one of the things you could
do in the online game was upload photos and since that's the only thing that players actually did
They said, 'Hey!, Why don't we make it?' Now, we call it 'A zoom-in Pivot' Where you take one part of the product,
and you make the whole product, you shrink-it-down to that one thing
You make the world's best photo uploading service, even though you meant to
make an on-line game
The first version of Twitter was this thing called 'ODEO' which was a podcasting service
when they made the pivot to Twitter it only had a few hundred customers so the
so-called vanity metrics were so low they actually went to their investors and said
we're so embarrassed about these results would you like your money back and
several of silicon valley's best investors made, what is now,
a billion dollar mistake of saying yes thank you
if you look at PayPal, it's about like
digital cyber cash on your PDA and you're like 'boy what kind of visionary is that?'
But they had the vision for online payments in some form they just didn't know exactly
what it was gonna look like. Let's talk about Groupon coz it's one of my favorites
Groupon started-out as a business called The Point
which was designed to help people do petitions. So imagine that you're like,
'OK I wanna do a protest at city hall, I'm mad about something' I don't wanna be the only person who show's-up
so we have a petition whereoff if a hundred people sign up
and say we'll all go to the protest, it tips, , and we all do it.
If we never get to a hundred it doesn't tip...Great idea. Right? Wrong! They got no traction at all
It was a disaster it didn't work so they were like, 'OK' we're gonna try something new
They decided to try the 'social commerce thing' Social commerce is about printing coupons where
we all get a discount if we all by at the same time i think it was a two for one pizza
in the pizza restaurant in the lobby of their building
okay that was the breakthrough technology twenty people redeemed it.
Now i don't know about you,
but..If I had been there, I would have known.
Oh obviously! Twenty free pizzas equals fastest company in history
to get a billion dollars in sales.
but most of us let's be honest we would not have known. 20 free pizzas! Whatever!
the reason the Groupon founders understood the power
of selling twenty free pizzas
is that they had failed for a year
to get anybody to buy anything at all
that actually made them excited enough to try the next experiment, and the next and
the next and the next
That's what a pivot is it's redeeming the failure
because we learned so much about what's possible
That's the name of the game. That's what this is about