10 ms·

No One Fails Anymore – Everybody ‘Pivots’

203 points by mcone 9y ago

gt565k 9y ago
What... this title is ridiculous. You fail, that's why you pivot. Hence the saying. "Fail fast and pivot" Pivoting just means you've taken some industry knowledge from your failed attempt at a product, and you are applying it to a new product or market fit by pivoting on your original idea. (at least in the context of start-ups / product development) There's no pivoting without failure. Also: > Trump’s innovation is to have mined a deeper vein of cynicism, exhausting the weary tropes of polite political discourse. He is the ultimate pivoter, aimlessly following his own impulses as his administration is mired in daily absurdities. WTF? Trump is the ultimate pivoter? Are you serious? This article is just ridiculous. Someone needs to learn the definition of pivot.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  You can't afford to not Pivot. Especially in tech, where the landscape changes so drastically and frequently. You must adapt or die quickly. Failure is not a badge of honor, or something to aspire to. It happens, and should be dealt with accordingly, and should not define a person or idea - but it shouldn't be glorified. The entire point of the article was "Trump changes his mind a lot". Supports will call that adapting, detractors will call that failure. Does it matter how it's labeled?
  - roceasta 9y ago
    Yes. The realistic alternative to pivoting isn't beating yourself up in a press conference or something like that: it's self-sabotage. People self-sabotage so they can pretend they never tried and thus avoid seeing themselves as failures.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > You fail, that's why you pivot. I remember being a kid, and our family driving up I-15 in Idaho. We topped over this hill, and way down there in the distance, there was an overpass over the freeway. I remember wondering how my dad could aim the vehicle so well that he'd go under that overpass. Now, as an adult I know that he couldn't. He didn't try to aim that precisely; he just steered the whole way. You can't (usually) aim your startup well enough at the beginning. That's OK. Steer. Sometimes the steering adjustments will be rather major. We call that "pivoting", but as far as I can tell it's pretty much the same thing, just on a bit larger scale.
- chadcmulligan 9y ago
  Throw it against the wall and see what sticks is perhaps an equally valid model
uptownfunk 9y ago
Yes, exactly, because we have to maintain this glowing facade that we're just crushing it all the time instead of acknowledging the everyday struggle or even gasp failure. I don't pick my friends based on their successful startup ventures, or if they're some 100x "rockstar" dev. Some of my best friends from high school are still finding their way in life in their 30s, and I for one don't give a sh*t how many times they have to "pivot" before they get to where they want to be.
pier25 9y ago
As long as you still have cash floating around
- Animats 9y ago
  Right. Pivoting is using the leftover assets from your previous failure to try something else. The alternative is liquidation. YC tries to give startups so little money that they can't pivot. They fail fast and are flushed out of the ecosystem quickly. The alternative for a VC is an army of zombies - companies that can cover their expenses, but not pay back their investors. Zombies still need investor attention, and owning too many zombies can choke a VC firm.
phoenixstrike 9y ago
...including this article, which pivots from Cernovich to Silicon Valley to politics and Trump. A far more interesting discussion would have been about the rampant neurosis of above-average (nationally speaking) educated young people in tech that rate themselves as being better than they actually are, leading to a deathly fear of failure and accountability (leading to "pivoting"), perhaps (IMO) coming from the psychological reluctance to take a good hard look in the mirror and admit that they are not as good/better than others as they think they are.
- leroy_masochist 9y ago
  Wish I could upvote this one twice. The weight of expectations on the shoulders of talented young people, ginned up by years of ersatz "success" in getting good grades and getting into college and getting more good grades and maybe even getting some seed funding -- this is the real "invisible hand" of SV. I feel like people in my parents' generation were acculturated to be happy with a house, a steady job, a car in the driveway, and beer in the fridge. Our generation by contrast seems as if it is populated by people who will consider themselves a massive disappointment if they don't turn out to be the next Zuck.
  - PeachPlum 9y ago
    Or, as my dad has repeatedly said to me "why can't you make something like Facebook and be rich?"
    - thomasjudge 9y ago
      https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-...
      - mjevans 9y ago
        While I think the infographics of that article are pretty accurate, I believe that this article doesn't benefit from the recent focus on income inequality and the massive schism of the 1% of the 1% from the other 99.99% of the population. I agree that expectations are a little unrealistic, particularly with anyone born after the early 90s, but also for many born after the late 70s. However the quality of life, slack time, and slack resources for happiness that other generations did experience during periods of prosperity are measurably lacking today. It is not unrealistic to feel unhappy about this; but what continues to amaze me is how ignorantly and emotionally many vote. Blatantly ignoring candidates who's platforms are arguably better able to deliver successful change in favor of candidates who sell them an easy bubble of illusions.
sriram_sun 9y ago
Only donkeys don't change their minds. Interestingly, I've heard donkeys are pretty intelligent creatures.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Animals that are correct don't have to change their minds.
memco 9y ago
“Anything we don't like, we'll turn it into a happy little tree or something; we don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents.” —Bob Ross
- vonnik 9y ago
  best quote ever.
  - vonnik 9y ago
    wow, 3 downvotes on a compliment. the negativity around here...
    - PotatoEngineer 9y ago
      If you like something, upvote it. If you're only saying the equivalent of "+1", please don't post - it's just (well-meaning) clutter. Also: check the guidelines link at the very bottom of the site (in tiny, nigh-unreadable type!): don't talk about votes, either up or down.
      - vonnik 9y ago
        Thanks for your clear answer. I appreciate it. I'm a bit surprised so many people have the time and inclination to be upvote police.
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” —Winston Churchill
  - elihu 9y ago
    "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." --G K Chesterton
  - pier25 9y ago
nipponese 9y ago
One's stubborn tenacity is another's embarrassing coverup.
louithethrid 9y ago
The whole idea of risk, winning and loosing is very warped from the outset. We come from small groups with very limited ressources. Taking risks, making a plan, always involved the power structure. There always could be only one plan, one chieftain executing it, else there be civil war and group breakup. If the plan failed, there where to options- the situation and the power structure would be salvaged, and the failure nver happend. And/Or a scapegoat would be found and ousted for the failure - a principle we declared responsibility (although undoing the damage would have been.. slightly more responsibe). Anyway, if you didnt sleep throughout your statistics classes, you know also that our perceptions of likelihood for plans to fail or succeed, our peception of luck- is also totally off. So what actually is a good plan? A good plan, is not one particular chain of actions, and tree of scenarios growing out of that base-scenario - but a investment into a likelihood enhancing environment for a whole overlapping forrest of such scenario trees. Take the idea of a book-shop for cooking recipes in medieval europe. That sounds like a great plan. Its what your family would support, and thus you would buy scribes and set out on this adventure. Now take the plan of selling printing presses. Everyone of your son and daughters could march of, producing there own version of a book-shop. You do not invest into a single "plan" and your shuffeling of investments, into succeeding or away from dieing branches of the scenario, might look like cowardice, indecisivness and pivoting - but in reality, you are just aware of human limitations and overcome them. For founders this is a dangerous way of thinking. Because at the larval stage, a company is that tribe, that family, in desperate need of the ilusion of one plan, one scenario, the ilusion of a chieftain knowing what tomorrows weather will bring. But keep that forrest in the backyard of your mind, and when nobody is watching - plant some seeds. There might grow a forrest.
vonnik 9y ago
This is an inane column, but I think one point on semantics needs to be made. Silverman assumes that failure and pivot are totally synonymous, and that pivot is just a cynical euphemism for failure. I think that they're are differences. Failure connotes a durable state that has repercussions. Pivot means we're still moving and we may be able to redirect some of our old momentum in a slightly new direction.
mjfl 9y ago
Would you fault a genetic algorithm that does more than one iteration? Why would you expect that your initial set of parameters / business model be optimal? That's just a silly way of thinking.
timothycrosley 9y ago
Way to spin trying new ideas and having determination to find a way to succeed despite failures in a negative light? The fact this has become the norm is good! People used to think that all the smart people just came up with a good idea all the sudden out of luck, and never failed. The reality is the people who succeeded in the past in spectacular fashion, are the same people who failed over and over again in spectacular fashion (pivoted).
- shinamee 9y ago
  Exactly and this should become a mantra for startups to follow, knowing that there is no miracle but hard work and strong flexibility for change/pivot when necessary
- derping69 9y ago
  This is the New York Times we are talking about, a company that got blindsided by the internet and social media. NYT is firing editors and renting out office space to stay solvent, it makes sense they would write this article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-16/new-york-times-to-sublease-headquarters-space-in-revenue-search https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-16/new-york-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/30/the-new-york-times-is-eliminating-its-copy-editing-desk-so-hundreds-of-employees-walked-out/?utm_term=.0da188f259a5 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/3...
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Can you think of any major old media company that didn't take it in the pants over the internet? I'd argue that there is something to be said for the ones that managed to survive at all.
    - adventured 9y ago
      Sure, there are some. SiriusXM (27 years old) is financially the only music subscription service that is thriving in terms of printing cash. Not only did they not take it in the pants due to to the rise of the Internet, their fortunes have radically improved over the last 15 years and they've perpetually added to their subscriber base. While Pandora and Spotify bleed red ink by the barrel, Sirius earned $800m in the last four quarters (with $1.5b in operating income). Fox and its various properties transitioned just fine and have had several record profit years in the last five years. The stock of Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc. has been hovering near all-time highs (its stock history going back to 1989) the last three years, and that's after spinning off the smaller Newscorp. Disney has thrived big time in the Internet era. They're far larger than they used to be. Their market cap is five times larger than it was in 1995 (and that's with a modest 17 PE ratio). CBS Corp's stock is near an all-time high (spun off in 2005) and their sales are as well. Thomson Reuters is doing just fine in the Internet era. They didn't take it in the pants at all. They're a century old media company (156 years for Reuters, 83 for Thomson), whose stock is at all-time highs, and their operational condition is strong. They're presently worth 10x what the New York Times is.
tinym 9y ago
Well; good?
jondubois 9y ago
The problem is that investors are too easy when it comes to giving second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth chances... And they absolutely suck at giving first chances to the right people. Investors just sit there and assume that the right people will find them, but they don't. The right people are too busy working to be chasing down investors 24/7. The first-timers who end up getting funded over and over again are usually the ones who network 24/7 and their only real talent is seducing investors who confuse their well-rehearsed talk for passion and intelligence.
- BatFastard 9y ago
  Speak it brother!
- tlogan 9y ago
  And why that is a problem at all? You can optimize your time to find one customer (read investor) which will give you $1M or to find 10K customers which will give you $100 each. Pick your fight.
  - gobengo 9y ago
    yeah but the investor is a customer of your equity and the other is a customer of your product. Both ways you get $1M, I guess, but in the long run it's completely different visavis sustainability. A goal of 'getting' $1M is really short-sighted IMO.
  - dilemma 9y ago
    investors are owners not customers
- thowaway222 9y ago
  Look, let me explain this as someone who's seen a lot of this: VCs make money on, approximately, the 2&20. 2% of the deposit and 20% of the exit. Here's why that matters: Most VCs will NEVER EVER SEE THE 20%. Most VCs suck, and they don't have any good exits, or often any exits at all. So they know they'll never get the 20%. Therefore, being rational optimizers, they try to suck that 2% dry by creating new funds (for their firm) and new funding rounds (for their investments). The investment is always just about to get big, we just need another round for more runway! HN tends to focus on the like 5 VC firms that make money as opposed to the 995 that don't. All kinds of shady stuff happens to these investments on life support, like kicking back money to the VC, paying for "business" travel for the VC, yadda yadda. The founders have no incentive at all to talk about it, since they need to get money for the next idea and it's all a reputation thing.
smrtinsert 9y ago
As soon as the guy from Digg "pivoted" I equated the two. I assumed everyone did.
watwut 9y ago
Pivot means you are changing what you do. Failure means you are in debt, company don't exists anymore and you are dealing with consequences. Not the same.
jedberg 9y ago
It's really easy to tell if a company pivoted or failed. If they ran out of money, they failed. If they still had money and started doing something new, they pivoted (and their previous product failed).
to_bpr 9y ago
Probably one of the lowest quality posts I've seen remain on HN's front page for quite some time. To pivot is to fail, to recognise one's failure, to pick oneself up and try again in another direction. On a personal level it's admirable. On a business level I've no opinion as these pivots are all privately funded. When the NYT is publishing these weird, poorly written and badly strung together political rants, is it any wonder they're "losing" in the age of new media?
hahahsnap 9y ago
.50 cents: I think most of the good 20% went to google and facebook and got into comfort zone of corporate politics when they were young in their 20s and they ended up having great compensation which make them stay there forever.
orionblastar 9y ago
This is a problem in American Culture. Nobody wants to be wrong and admit to making mistakes and failing so they learn from it. Instead, it is "saving face" to say I pivoted instead of I failed. I ran two startups one in the mid-1990s and one in 1999-2001, I gained experience as a President and later Vice-President to let my business partner get more experience as a President. I have degrees in computer and business areas as well and combine the two. Thing is I failed because the first business did not have a credit card system and we took checks that later bounced. (You'll find people who do this on purpose to get free stuff from a small business because we can't afford lawyers to collect on them.) and also we sold computers and computer services trying to do databases and make software. Big Box stores ate our lunch with $300 PCs via Internet Rebates and ours was $700 but with better quality parts so the PC lasts longer. We tried the same thing with the second company and my business partner got sick with a heart attack (he survived) but the business suffered as a result and closed. Yeah I failed twice, but I keep on trying to do better and I'm in the St. Louis MO area and cannot relocate, and of course not on the west coast where all of the action is apparently. I got a friend who tried to offer computer services in the Branson MO area, most of them don't even use a computer out there, and entertainers go without work when out of season and apply for unemployment, etc. You have to time the seasons of Branson when the shows are popular and then save expenses when they are out of season. Plus most people there just buy from Wal-Mart for the computer needs. Yeah, location really matters. He had to join his wife's Antique FLea Market store and close down his computer store and get into the Flipping business of driving to garage sales to buy stuff cheap for the flea market, etc. In my area after the Ferguson riots (just a few miles from my house) the economy is still trying to recover. I try not to get into politics, treat everyone as an individual and hope for the best. I've worked for FORTUNE 500 companies and mid-size to small companies as well. Look at Steve Jobs' career. He failed many times. Apple ///, Apple Lisa, even the first Macintosh was a flop and he left Apple in 1985 to found Next. He would brag that he just asked people and they gave him what he asked, but trying to get Computer Stores to sell the Apple 1 computer made him get rejected a lot. It was only when some VC saw potential in the Apple 1 that he got money to make it go live and sell via mail order. Also Apple kept bleeding money until it bought Next and got Steve Jobs back, and while Next was a failure and mistake, merging it with Mac OS to make Mac OSX and later going from PowerPC to Intel chips worked. Without Steve Jobs failures, there would be no iPod or iTunes, and no iPhone and iPad. Sure Apple wasn't the first to invent the smart phone etc, but they made them easier to use and better than the competition like Blackberry and Windows CE phones. Instead, culture does not forget or forgive, this is against compassion and empathy, and in a way hate based. As a baby, we did not walk we crawled first, and in learning how to walk we kept falling down until we could control balance and put one foot in front of another. We forget stuff like that, and social anxiety is put on people who fail and make mistakes, and then nobody learns anything and people keep making the same mistakes and failure and try to hide them. Does that make sense to anyone? In Steve Jobs failures, he found a way to make a success out of them. He only did so after he went back to school for a business degree after leaving Apple.
sbussard 9y ago
This article pivoted from talking about pivoting to bashing Trump

203 points by mcone 9y ago

What... this title is ridiculous. You fail, that's why you pivot. Hence the saying. "Fail fast and pivot" Pivoting just means you've taken some industry knowledge from your failed attempt at a product, and you are applying it to a new product or market fit by pivoting on your original idea. (at least in the context of start-ups / product development) There's no pivoting without failure. Also: > Trump’s innovation is to have mined a deeper vein of cynicism, exhausting the weary tropes of polite political discourse. He is the ultimate pivoter, aimlessly following his own impulses as his administration is mired in daily absurdities. WTF? Trump is the ultimate pivoter? Are you serious? This article is just ridiculous. Someone needs to learn the definition of pivot.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nxsynonym 9y ago
You can't afford to not Pivot. Especially in tech, where the landscape changes so drastically and frequently. You must adapt or die quickly. Failure is not a badge of honor, or something to aspire to. It happens, and should be dealt with accordingly, and should not define a person or idea - but it shouldn't be glorified. The entire point of the article was "Trump changes his mind a lot". Supports will call that adapting, detractors will call that failure. Does it matter how it's labeled?
- roceasta 9y ago
  Yes. The realistic alternative to pivoting isn't beating yourself up in a press conference or something like that: it's self-sabotage. People self-sabotage so they can pretend they never tried and thus avoid seeing themselves as failures.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> You fail, that's why you pivot. I remember being a kid, and our family driving up I-15 in Idaho. We topped over this hill, and way down there in the distance, there was an overpass over the freeway. I remember wondering how my dad could aim the vehicle so well that he'd go under that overpass. Now, as an adult I know that he couldn't. He didn't try to aim that precisely; he just steered the whole way. You can't (usually) aim your startup well enough at the beginning. That's OK. Steer. Sometimes the steering adjustments will be rather major. We call that "pivoting", but as far as I can tell it's pretty much the same thing, just on a bit larger scale.
chadcmulligan 9y ago
Throw it against the wall and see what sticks is perhaps an equally valid model

uptownfunk 9y ago

Yes, exactly, because we have to maintain this glowing facade that we're just crushing it all the time instead of acknowledging the everyday struggle or even gasp failure. I don't pick my friends based on their successful startup ventures, or if they're some 100x "rockstar" dev. Some of my best friends from high school are still finding their way in life in their 30s, and I for one don't give a sh*t how many times they have to "pivot" before they get to where they want to be.

pier25 9y ago

As long as you still have cash floating around

Animats 9y ago
Right. Pivoting is using the leftover assets from your previous failure to try something else. The alternative is liquidation. YC tries to give startups so little money that they can't pivot. They fail fast and are flushed out of the ecosystem quickly. The alternative for a VC is an army of zombies - companies that can cover their expenses, but not pay back their investors. Zombies still need investor attention, and owning too many zombies can choke a VC firm.

phoenixstrike 9y ago

...including this article, which pivots from Cernovich to Silicon Valley to politics and Trump. A far more interesting discussion would have been about the rampant neurosis of above-average (nationally speaking) educated young people in tech that rate themselves as being better than they actually are, leading to a deathly fear of failure and accountability (leading to "pivoting"), perhaps (IMO) coming from the psychological reluctance to take a good hard look in the mirror and admit that they are not as good/better than others as they think they are.

leroy_masochist 9y ago
Wish I could upvote this one twice. The weight of expectations on the shoulders of talented young people, ginned up by years of ersatz "success" in getting good grades and getting into college and getting more good grades and maybe even getting some seed funding -- this is the real "invisible hand" of SV. I feel like people in my parents' generation were acculturated to be happy with a house, a steady job, a car in the driveway, and beer in the fridge. Our generation by contrast seems as if it is populated by people who will consider themselves a massive disappointment if they don't turn out to be the next Zuck.
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  Or, as my dad has repeatedly said to me "why can't you make something like Facebook and be rich?"
  - thomasjudge 9y ago
    https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-...
    - mjevans 9y ago
      While I think the infographics of that article are pretty accurate, I believe that this article doesn't benefit from the recent focus on income inequality and the massive schism of the 1% of the 1% from the other 99.99% of the population. I agree that expectations are a little unrealistic, particularly with anyone born after the early 90s, but also for many born after the late 70s. However the quality of life, slack time, and slack resources for happiness that other generations did experience during periods of prosperity are measurably lacking today. It is not unrealistic to feel unhappy about this; but what continues to amaze me is how ignorantly and emotionally many vote. Blatantly ignoring candidates who's platforms are arguably better able to deliver successful change in favor of candidates who sell them an easy bubble of illusions.

sriram_sun 9y ago

Only donkeys don't change their minds. Interestingly, I've heard donkeys are pretty intelligent creatures.

jessaustin 9y ago
Animals that are correct don't have to change their minds.

memco 9y ago

“Anything we don't like, we'll turn it into a happy little tree or something; we don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents.” —Bob Ross

vonnik 9y ago
best quote ever.
- vonnik 9y ago
  wow, 3 downvotes on a compliment. the negativity around here...
  - PotatoEngineer 9y ago
    If you like something, upvote it. If you're only saying the equivalent of "+1", please don't post - it's just (well-meaning) clutter. Also: check the guidelines link at the very bottom of the site (in tiny, nigh-unreadable type!): don't talk about votes, either up or down.
    - vonnik 9y ago
      Thanks for your clear answer. I appreciate it. I'm a bit surprised so many people have the time and inclination to be upvote police.
Raphmedia 9y ago
“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” —Winston Churchill
- elihu 9y ago
  "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." --G K Chesterton
- pier25 9y ago

nipponese 9y ago

One's stubborn tenacity is another's embarrassing coverup.

louithethrid 9y ago

The whole idea of risk, winning and loosing is very warped from the outset. We come from small groups with very limited ressources. Taking risks, making a plan, always involved the power structure. There always could be only one plan, one chieftain executing it, else there be civil war and group breakup. If the plan failed, there where to options- the situation and the power structure would be salvaged, and the failure nver happend. And/Or a scapegoat would be found and ousted for the failure - a principle we declared responsibility (although undoing the damage would have been.. slightly more responsibe). Anyway, if you didnt sleep throughout your statistics classes, you know also that our perceptions of likelihood for plans to fail or succeed, our peception of luck- is also totally off. So what actually is a good plan? A good plan, is not one particular chain of actions, and tree of scenarios growing out of that base-scenario - but a investment into a likelihood enhancing environment for a whole overlapping forrest of such scenario trees. Take the idea of a book-shop for cooking recipes in medieval europe. That sounds like a great plan. Its what your family would support, and thus you would buy scribes and set out on this adventure. Now take the plan of selling printing presses. Everyone of your son and daughters could march of, producing there own version of a book-shop. You do not invest into a single "plan" and your shuffeling of investments, into succeeding or away from dieing branches of the scenario, might look like cowardice, indecisivness and pivoting - but in reality, you are just aware of human limitations and overcome them. For founders this is a dangerous way of thinking. Because at the larval stage, a company is that tribe, that family, in desperate need of the ilusion of one plan, one scenario, the ilusion of a chieftain knowing what tomorrows weather will bring. But keep that forrest in the backyard of your mind, and when nobody is watching - plant some seeds. There might grow a forrest.

vonnik 9y ago

This is an inane column, but I think one point on semantics needs to be made. Silverman assumes that failure and pivot are totally synonymous, and that pivot is just a cynical euphemism for failure. I think that they're are differences. Failure connotes a durable state that has repercussions. Pivot means we're still moving and we may be able to redirect some of our old momentum in a slightly new direction.

mjfl 9y ago

Would you fault a genetic algorithm that does more than one iteration? Why would you expect that your initial set of parameters / business model be optimal? That's just a silly way of thinking.

timothycrosley 9y ago

Way to spin trying new ideas and having determination to find a way to succeed despite failures in a negative light? The fact this has become the norm is good! People used to think that all the smart people just came up with a good idea all the sudden out of luck, and never failed. The reality is the people who succeeded in the past in spectacular fashion, are the same people who failed over and over again in spectacular fashion (pivoted).

shinamee 9y ago
Exactly and this should become a mantra for startups to follow, knowing that there is no miracle but hard work and strong flexibility for change/pivot when necessary
derping69 9y ago
This is the New York Times we are talking about, a company that got blindsided by the internet and social media. NYT is firing editors and renting out office space to stay solvent, it makes sense they would write this article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-16/new-york-times-to-sublease-headquarters-space-in-revenue-search https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-16/new-york-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/30/the-new-york-times-is-eliminating-its-copy-editing-desk-so-hundreds-of-employees-walked-out/?utm_term=.0da188f259a5 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/3...
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Can you think of any major old media company that didn't take it in the pants over the internet? I'd argue that there is something to be said for the ones that managed to survive at all.
  - adventured 9y ago
    Sure, there are some. SiriusXM (27 years old) is financially the only music subscription service that is thriving in terms of printing cash. Not only did they not take it in the pants due to to the rise of the Internet, their fortunes have radically improved over the last 15 years and they've perpetually added to their subscriber base. While Pandora and Spotify bleed red ink by the barrel, Sirius earned $800m in the last four quarters (with $1.5b in operating income). Fox and its various properties transitioned just fine and have had several record profit years in the last five years. The stock of Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc. has been hovering near all-time highs (its stock history going back to 1989) the last three years, and that's after spinning off the smaller Newscorp. Disney has thrived big time in the Internet era. They're far larger than they used to be. Their market cap is five times larger than it was in 1995 (and that's with a modest 17 PE ratio). CBS Corp's stock is near an all-time high (spun off in 2005) and their sales are as well. Thomson Reuters is doing just fine in the Internet era. They didn't take it in the pants at all. They're a century old media company (156 years for Reuters, 83 for Thomson), whose stock is at all-time highs, and their operational condition is strong. They're presently worth 10x what the New York Times is.

tinym 9y ago

Well; good?

jondubois 9y ago

The problem is that investors are too easy when it comes to giving second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth chances... And they absolutely suck at giving first chances to the right people. Investors just sit there and assume that the right people will find them, but they don't. The right people are too busy working to be chasing down investors 24/7. The first-timers who end up getting funded over and over again are usually the ones who network 24/7 and their only real talent is seducing investors who confuse their well-rehearsed talk for passion and intelligence.

BatFastard 9y ago
Speak it brother!
tlogan 9y ago
And why that is a problem at all? You can optimize your time to find one customer (read investor) which will give you $1M or to find 10K customers which will give you $100 each. Pick your fight.
- gobengo 9y ago
  yeah but the investor is a customer of your equity and the other is a customer of your product. Both ways you get $1M, I guess, but in the long run it's completely different visavis sustainability. A goal of 'getting' $1M is really short-sighted IMO.
- dilemma 9y ago
  investors are owners not customers
thowaway222 9y ago
Look, let me explain this as someone who's seen a lot of this: VCs make money on, approximately, the 2&20. 2% of the deposit and 20% of the exit. Here's why that matters: Most VCs will NEVER EVER SEE THE 20%. Most VCs suck, and they don't have any good exits, or often any exits at all. So they know they'll never get the 20%. Therefore, being rational optimizers, they try to suck that 2% dry by creating new funds (for their firm) and new funding rounds (for their investments). The investment is always just about to get big, we just need another round for more runway! HN tends to focus on the like 5 VC firms that make money as opposed to the 995 that don't. All kinds of shady stuff happens to these investments on life support, like kicking back money to the VC, paying for "business" travel for the VC, yadda yadda. The founders have no incentive at all to talk about it, since they need to get money for the next idea and it's all a reputation thing.

smrtinsert 9y ago

As soon as the guy from Digg "pivoted" I equated the two. I assumed everyone did.

watwut 9y ago

Pivot means you are changing what you do. Failure means you are in debt, company don't exists anymore and you are dealing with consequences. Not the same.

jedberg 9y ago

It's really easy to tell if a company pivoted or failed. If they ran out of money, they failed. If they still had money and started doing something new, they pivoted (and their previous product failed).

to_bpr 9y ago

Probably one of the lowest quality posts I've seen remain on HN's front page for quite some time. To pivot is to fail, to recognise one's failure, to pick oneself up and try again in another direction. On a personal level it's admirable. On a business level I've no opinion as these pivots are all privately funded. When the NYT is publishing these weird, poorly written and badly strung together political rants, is it any wonder they're "losing" in the age of new media?

hahahsnap 9y ago

.50 cents: I think most of the good 20% went to google and facebook and got into comfort zone of corporate politics when they were young in their 20s and they ended up having great compensation which make them stay there forever.

orionblastar 9y ago

This is a problem in American Culture. Nobody wants to be wrong and admit to making mistakes and failing so they learn from it. Instead, it is "saving face" to say I pivoted instead of I failed. I ran two startups one in the mid-1990s and one in 1999-2001, I gained experience as a President and later Vice-President to let my business partner get more experience as a President. I have degrees in computer and business areas as well and combine the two. Thing is I failed because the first business did not have a credit card system and we took checks that later bounced. (You'll find people who do this on purpose to get free stuff from a small business because we can't afford lawyers to collect on them.) and also we sold computers and computer services trying to do databases and make software. Big Box stores ate our lunch with $300 PCs via Internet Rebates and ours was $700 but with better quality parts so the PC lasts longer. We tried the same thing with the second company and my business partner got sick with a heart attack (he survived) but the business suffered as a result and closed. Yeah I failed twice, but I keep on trying to do better and I'm in the St. Louis MO area and cannot relocate, and of course not on the west coast where all of the action is apparently. I got a friend who tried to offer computer services in the Branson MO area, most of them don't even use a computer out there, and entertainers go without work when out of season and apply for unemployment, etc. You have to time the seasons of Branson when the shows are popular and then save expenses when they are out of season. Plus most people there just buy from Wal-Mart for the computer needs. Yeah, location really matters. He had to join his wife's Antique FLea Market store and close down his computer store and get into the Flipping business of driving to garage sales to buy stuff cheap for the flea market, etc. In my area after the Ferguson riots (just a few miles from my house) the economy is still trying to recover. I try not to get into politics, treat everyone as an individual and hope for the best. I've worked for FORTUNE 500 companies and mid-size to small companies as well. Look at Steve Jobs' career. He failed many times. Apple ///, Apple Lisa, even the first Macintosh was a flop and he left Apple in 1985 to found Next. He would brag that he just asked people and they gave him what he asked, but trying to get Computer Stores to sell the Apple 1 computer made him get rejected a lot. It was only when some VC saw potential in the Apple 1 that he got money to make it go live and sell via mail order. Also Apple kept bleeding money until it bought Next and got Steve Jobs back, and while Next was a failure and mistake, merging it with Mac OS to make Mac OSX and later going from PowerPC to Intel chips worked. Without Steve Jobs failures, there would be no iPod or iTunes, and no iPhone and iPad. Sure Apple wasn't the first to invent the smart phone etc, but they made them easier to use and better than the competition like Blackberry and Windows CE phones. Instead, culture does not forget or forgive, this is against compassion and empathy, and in a way hate based. As a baby, we did not walk we crawled first, and in learning how to walk we kept falling down until we could control balance and put one foot in front of another. We forget stuff like that, and social anxiety is put on people who fail and make mistakes, and then nobody learns anything and people keep making the same mistakes and failure and try to hide them. Does that make sense to anyone? In Steve Jobs failures, he found a way to make a success out of them. He only did so after he went back to school for a business degree after leaving Apple.

sbussard 9y ago

This article pivoted from talking about pivoting to bashing Trump