10 ms·

The Pivot

516 points by pdsull 12y ago

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
The internet is a psychology experiment? Well, maybe a tiny fraction of it. You know, those spammy pages where they promise something amazing if only you'll enter your email address. I'm not sure we need more of that. Its like someone pretending to sell brushes wanting in your house, who keeps glancing around casing the joint while blathering some spiel. As a model for qualifying internet product plans, its going to suffer from self-selection of the customers - you know, those lonely people who will talk to anybody, even a brush salesman, and will tell them anything they want to hear.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  "Your browser is a Skinner box" would've been a better title. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
- michaelmior 12y ago
  Experiments are far broader than landing pages for nonexistent products. The same thing applies to building a working product and realizing it's not what your customers want. Or building a small feature that turns out to be a product in itself. The entire product development process is a bit of a psychology experiment. Try to understand what your customers want, build it. Learn from it. Repeat.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    A small bit of feature isn't much different than nothing. So the salesman shows you a brush - but his sample case is empty. Same issue - its a hoax, designed to waste my time so the guy can case my house, my computer, my needs.
    - michaelmior 12y ago
      Not what I meant. Suppose a company produces brushes. But they find out there a lot of people buying their brushes just to remove the handle and attach it to other things because they happen to really love the handles. Maybe the brush company is in the wrong business.
      - imjustsaying 12y ago
        Right. Which is the advantage of targeted advertising based on user profiles - the customer sees a product they might actually need instead of being offered a free iPhone.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > You know, those spammy pages where they promise something amazing if only you'll enter your email address. You mean, like most of the startups nowdays?
matznerd 12y ago
does anyone else think his site design looks similar to youtube?
MichaelMoser123 12y ago
it has something to do with psychology; it seems that companies that do an ICQ like messenger are going to make it big; Skype, whatsapp, facebook, you get the idea.
drb311 12y ago
Software can now provide just about any user experience quite easily, so the software industry is now all about figuring out what experiences people want. Is that all he's saying?
- duderific 12y ago
  It's an important point, and it's not just the software industry. If two companies X and Y provide exactly the same or similar service, but company X's user experience is superior, it will probably win out. Consider that Dominos just released the ability to order pizza via a voice operated app. Their pizza is not going to be any better than it was the day before, but by giving people a (supposedly) better way to order, they may be able to take market share away from Round Table or whoever.
aresant 12y ago
"Building a product for the Internet is now the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard part." This feels like a meta-Dilbert joke about how business guys perceive technology & development. As if the "product" is somehow separated from "getting people to understand. . . and use it"
devindotcom 12y ago
If you remove the questionable assumption that most of the ideas are good, isn't it rather kind of institutionalizing "throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick?"
- cfield 12y ago
  Sort of. It's kind of institutionalizing the process by which you acquire and throw shit. And this is what should be institutionalized if you agree with Scott's premise that "success in the start-up realm is mostly luck".
- trhway 12y ago
  that is how evolution and natural selection works. Beats intelligent design, at least in the long run and on a large scale.
- return0 12y ago
  I think it's always been like that, it's just that the internet allows light-speed iteration, hence you see the same phenomenon that would take decades in the past happening within days.
- guelo 12y ago
  The difference is the analytics. If it's a good startup it's going to learn so much from the shit on the wall that the next pivot will be much more informed and likely to be succesful.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  Well yes, but as Serious Businesspeople, we need a Serious Business Word to describe the shit-throwing process. Like "pivot."
- bengali3 12y ago
  I like: "throw enough shit at the wall and you'll learn how to make some of it stick?" because you must learn at every turn
- jorleif 12y ago
trhway 12y ago
>building product X and selling the company to Google for a billion dollars. Oh no! it was my secret business plan which i have for several years been working on in my mind during all these hard-to-stay-awake afternoon hours in my cubicle ... opsss... at my desk at highly collaborative (ie. noisy) and innovative (no sane person would do such a space for him/herself) open space at BigCo-s
wdewind 12y ago
For those of us not working on cat photo sharing products for the ever shifting consumer market there is considerably less luck, throwing random stuff at the wall, and pivoting involved. B2B SaaS is pretty nice. Join us on the dark side :)
- wlievens 12y ago
  The big question is: how do you discover and identify a good b2b problem that needs solving in the first place.
  - guelo 12y ago
    Exactly. It's the same. You throw up an idea and start pivoting. If you have a more staid business model some startup will eventually find your niche and out hustle you.
    - wdewind 12y ago
      No, not really. In our (Justworks) case, our founder had to setup payroll, benefits and compliance for multiple companies (Adtuitive and Etsy) and so was intimately familiar with the problem when he started it.
  - silverlake 12y ago
    You work in that industry until you understand it intimately and develop connections.
  - wdewind 12y ago
    A lot of the "throw it up there and see what happens" movement comes from young engineers who literally lack the life experience to know what problems to solve. Given that scenario, and the intense pressure that comes from SV for young people to succeed, the approach makes sense, but there is a longer term, more considered approach to things. Especially for B2B startups, the best way to come up with an idea is to work at larger businesses and see what problems they are facing. Of course, if you are a young person who knows they want to start a startup, this seems like a roundabout approach, and one that requires a lot of faith. It's hard, and I see why people are attracted to "release, iterate, release," but I don't think it's the best approach. This doesn't mean you don't iterate. A lot of the lean startup stuff is still useful to us (a/b testing for more focused UI etc.). But generally speaking, we know where the product is going, and our customers' needs, often better than them.
aleem 12y ago
Pivot as per the blog post seems to be a mix of extending, innovating and leveraging what you have. I am not bothered by the exact strategy since the concepts are all relevant. Before the word pivot was being bandied about, Microsoft had Hotmail and Hotmail had something like 200 million users (over decade ago). Microsoft released a Hotmail notifier that got prime real estate in your system tray (next to the clock). Most companies knew that the the system tray and the desktop were both prime real estate. The Hotmail Notifier tray icon solved a genuine problem: users knew right away if new mail had arrived. In a future release the Hotmail notifier got extended to a chat application: MSN Messenger. Since Hotmail had lots of users, it managed to take over ICQ and AOL fairly quickly. MSN Messenger tried hard to market other services and products via a constantly displaying ad unit. Messenger then assigned a blog to every user that could be activated within a few clicks. A new blog post by a user would be indicated by a star (internally they were referred to as "gleams"). I recall Microsoft claimed to have become the largest blogging network shortly thereafter though this was probably a numbers game because very few were active bloggers. Microsoft also had other ambitions such as Passport, Shopping, etc but they failed to translate/convert users from the chat window to the browser window. I am not sure if either of those scenarios qualify as pivots in the classical sense. MSN outlived Hotmail though not for long. Passport got mixed reception. MSN shopping didn't take off but Microsoft threw a lot of things out there, hoping something would stick. This is also what Scott's post seems to suggest though I am not sure if this is such a great idea as its costly. MSN has made a loss in nearly every quarter. One observation I drew from this is that if you have passive users, you can do a lot more with them. Social browsing is passive (chat, FB and even email back when chain mails and mail groups didn't face competition from Orkut or Facebook walls). You can throw games, videos, pictures and interest-based activities like restaurants and reviews at passive users. Mail is not a passive medium anymore. That's why Google Drive seems to make sense only some of the time, when I need to collaborate on Google Docs. At other times, it gets in the way, for example, when I want to download certain attachments. Active users rarely deviate from their goal. This would be mostly Google Search users who want to complete the goal of finding something as quickly as possible. These users are definitely much harder to funnel into other services. To capitalise on active users it seems that innovation is key. Google search added the calculator, conversions, weather, scoreboards, etc. I suppose the pivot here is using the search box as user-friendly command line sans the strict syntax. However, forcing these users down a different funnel such as Google+ didn't work well.
e40 12y ago
Success simply can't be predicted to any level of statistical comfort. There are, however, a small percentage of people that consistently succeed. I met a guy like this, and I came to find out he had eliminated a lot of the risk of his software ventures by having a ready-made market for his company among his friends in the venture/banking world. I saw him do it a few times and realized that it was cheating, in a sense. I could replicate the first N-1 steps he did, but that last one required an in with the right crowd, which I didn't have.
- klochner 12y ago
  The luck thing mostly applies to consumer internet, see the comment [1] from wdewind elsewhere in this thread. For B2B/SaaS you can lower the risk a lot, especially if a team member has domain knowledge and industry connections. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901437
- imgabe 12y ago
  Given a large enough population with random outcomes, of course a small percentage will consistently succeed.
  - nickpinkston 12y ago
    It's not ALL luck - some people do way better than rolling the dice alone would suggest. Of course, it's very hard to measure this and know if you're one of those people.
    - NhanH 12y ago
      I don't think anyone would say it's all luck. People with skill will do better than the AVERAGE rolls. But with a large enough population, some one will be able to get all 6 out of a hundred rolls just by luck. Given a success list alone you can't tell if it's luck or skill.
    - imgabe 12y ago
      I'm not saying it's all luck, but if you have a million people rolling dice, some percentage of them will have a lucky streak doing "better than rolling dice would suggest". A random outcome doesn't mean every individual gets the average result every time.
peterwwillis 12y ago
So, at a basic level, a pivot is just a field experiment without a control? Or is it an observational study?
- return0 12y ago
  I think it's another word for "moving on"
- yid 12y ago
  It's just another step in a stochastic optimization algorithm.
noname123 12y ago
Man can't wait for someone to build a pivoting web framework on Github, where I can build a subscription based service and then switch whatever the product is with the data schema, and the pricing and the description page changes. Basically a framework that already has Stripe/Paypal payment integration to charge a user's CC, a schema for a informational or subscription-based product that I can modify pricing and description for, and some front-end templates to modify the landing page and call to action and A/B testing analytics for me to optimize on conversion. Kinda of like A/B testing but hedging my bets and executing all of my business ideas at once!
- sjg007 12y ago
  Kida like wufoo but instead wuApp.
- nileshtrivedi 12y ago
  We need a DSL for creating tech startups!
silverlake 12y ago
Consumer internet startups are like Hollywood entertainment. No one knows what TV shows or movies will be successful. The industry tries to make smart bets: invest in big name directors or actors, or sequels or copycats or cheap reality shows, but it's still a gamble. Successful shows come out of nowhere. So they keep trying random shows every season and see which ones stick. Doesn't this sound like Silicon Valley?
- bengali3 12y ago
  I agree that it is similar, but that's the nature of all businesses, right? Prior performance is used all over the business world to justify decisions. I'm sure you've heard "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" Investment = risk, everyone wants to minimize it while maximizing the upside. From this blog post, it sounds like the ability to pivot smart and fast ( fast failing.. that rings a bell..) could enhance ones probability of success. And the ability to pivot away from your 'baby' into the scary unknown again takes a special kind of skill - Letting Go aka: know when to fold 'em.
dueprocess 12y ago
It doesn't sound like a psychology experiment Scott is talking about, but a "stumble-upon" strategy. Psychology is a little more elegant than just pivot, pivot, pivot.
crawshaw 12y ago
This notion of commodity technology doesn't apply to every startup. Boston Dynamics was not a company slapping together commodity technology and testing user behavior. But it does apply to a lot of startups. And that's why I work for a big company, because I'm here for long-term big change, not fashion and profit.
natural219 12y ago
This is a great blog post, but I want to point out that this is not a new idea, just a way to express an old idea using new terms ("pivot", "startups", etc.) What Scott is trying to express is that, in a capitalist economy, money is the goal. The process of getting money, once technical innovation is subtracted, is called Marketing. The process of doing Marketing is to understand psychology -- given a set of craftable stimuli, how can you influence the ape to swipe her credit card.
- jasoncartwright 12y ago
  Absolutely - just happens faster. Nokia was a paper mill (1865), Suzuki made looms (1910), Mannesmann produced steel tubes (1890), and Berkshire Hathaway did textile manufacturing (1839)
Spearchucker 12y ago
In 2010 Ross Anderson pointed out (stated rather emphatically actually) that security is driven by only two things - psychology and economics. Software is no different. Security Engineering - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B004BDOZI0/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1402956046&sr=8-2&pi=SL75 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B004BDOZI0/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qi...
- plainOldText 12y ago
  Or if you want to read it online for free: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
triplesec 12y ago
do remember that this guy is a comedian... so this I see as pithy satire more than actual analysis. As such it's pretty good
callmeed 12y ago
> And then they find out that success in the start-up realm is mostly luck. They discover this by trying great ideas coupled with great execution and failing. While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Or, there is at least some severe cognitive dissonance going on when they begin to discover it. Even "the pivot" itself was made popular by The Lean Startup–the book that many take as the formula for startup success (very much the antithesis of luck). Yes, you have to hustle. Yes, you have to build something people want. Yes, you should have an awesome team. When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. ("I couldn't get funding", "Google changed their algorithm", "I couldn't hire the right person for X") Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can't code as good as you and didn't go to as good a school as you–then it was most definitely luck.
- rmrfrmrf 12y ago
  > While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Probably because it's not exactly true. The whole point of all that data is to see which aspects of a business work and which parts don't. The author is describing pivots a bit hyperbolically for the sake of drama/artistic license, but it's not like the C-level executives pivot by rolling the dice and seeing what they come up with. A successful pivot works by observing which parts work, dropping the parts that don't work, and building up the parts that people like. Think about the last SV product/service you purchased. Did you buy it because you had a random thought, or did you buy it because it actually solved a need of yours?
  - hmsimha 12y ago
    Succeeding in the startup world is luck like succeeding in poker is luck. Sure, there is an element of luck undeniably involved, but in the long term, raw talent should play a significant role as well.
    - HNJohnC 12y ago
      I suspect you might not be paying enough attention to the issue.
cpncrunch 12y ago
I'm a little disappointed...I expected to see a cartoon.
mhartl 12y ago
I wonder if there's a way for startups to systematize Adams's insight that "[e]very entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade" by hiring professional psychologists.
nbarry 12y ago
It reminds me of Jim Collins' concept (not original to him, I know) of shooting lots of little bullets and seeing which one hits, rather than wasting gunpowder on one big cannonball before you're even sure you're aimed in the right direction. Except he mostly used that concept to describe how companies decide which individual products or strategies to focus on, while the idea of a pivot is that you shift your entire company to do something else. (Reminds me of another Collins metaphor - it's important to get the right people on the bus first, and then you can decide together where to drive.)
haomiao 12y ago
What the author (and really everyone in the Valley) is referring to as "luck" is that fundamentally the whole process is stochastic: there's an unavoidable randomness. Probability is involved. Now, mini rant here: whenever people talk about something being random there's a sense that it's COMPLETELY random: the probability distribution is uniform and anything can happen. Lottery tickets, throwing dice, flipping coins. And, not to put too fine a point on it, that is COMPLETELY, UTTERLY WRONG. Saying there's probabilistic uncertainty in something doesn't mean the distributions are uniform. It just means given all the inputs you can't always predict all the outputs. No matter what you do, no matter what happens, the result can be one of many things. 1 or 0. Success or failure. This doesn't mean you can't DO SOMETHING about it though, and that's precisely what people are doing. Figure out the patterns, cut through the uncertainty, and try to find your way to the promised land. What the author's describing using the language of social science and valley speak is the same thing that the machine learning/AI/robotics community learned in the past few decades. They started out with formal logics and rigid rules, and they learned that to succeed in a random world, you have to embrace the randomness. Build it deeply into your systems and processes and all of a sudden you start performing better than your wildest expectations. Model, measure, evaluate, pivot, repeat. That's pretty damn familiar. What's it describing? A closed loop control system. Change the terminology a bit and you're talking about a Kalman filter with a feedback controller. What's a learning algorithm but a way to fit patterns to noisy, partially random data? And that's what this is all about. Luck doesn't mean it's all random, just that you can't control everything. And being good doesn't mean you eliminate the randomness, it means finding the patterns and making randomness work for you. Is there randomness in poker? Sure. Of course. But there's a shit ton of skill too (I know, because I don't have any of it). Don't confuse a poker game for a game of dice.
ritchiea 12y ago
What really bothers me about this type of thinking is the assumption that every team is equally talented & motivated. I might go as far as saying the talent/intelligence landscape is somewhat homogenous but having been around early stage startups for years now there is definitely a power law distribution of motivation & organization. It's a lot easier to say you will do anything to succeed and act the part and struggle and listen to your investors like they're bosses and let your startup die out while going through the motions than it is to be relentlessly resourceful. It also benefits to be self critical and unattached to an ideal of a product in a way to allow your product to be what your users respond to rather than some stubborn vision. All this to say, there are definitely a ton of bad startups out there, people who see an easy fundraising landscape, take advantage of connections or even make them. Or people that get to a certain point and don't really want to face reality. Instead of floating all the platitudes we float about there being lots of talented teams, it would be nice to see some honesty. That a lot of startups have a founder or two that isn't that dedicated but is there because he/she isn't sure what else to be doing. That a lot of startups are a vanity project of one of the founders and the founder doesn't have the modesty to actually sell to users/potential employees. That at a lot of startups there is friction between the founders that puts the product in danger because they have equal-ish power but between them lack a coherent vision for the future. And a lot of these companies with bad foundations have brilliant founders. Just because companies are founded by smart people doesn't mean they have a strong foundation. That is something we should be honest about. This isn't to say that it doesn't take luck, but there is a lot that helps to get right that a lot of startups aren't getting right off the bat.
- swanson 12y ago
  A slight spin on that assumption that I've seen in some lean startup materials is to assume that "software delivery is constant and guaranteed" - which is used to help move the identification of risk away from technology and towards the business viability. In that case, I think it is somewhat useful, but speaking as a software developer - it is very rarely the case that a software project goes as smoothly and reliably as a fancy pitch deck makes it out to be. It is easy to say things like "small iterations", "continuous delivery", "move fast", etc but much harder to, you know, do them. Any old team thrown together off the street is not going to have that skillset to achieve that. I don't think it entirely discounts the ideas or concepts, but I certainly gives me pause.
drivingmenuts 12y ago
"quality is less important than speed" So, we're producing crap ... but it's really quick crap quickly crapped.
yiedyie 12y ago
TL;DR > Internet is no longer a technology. The Internet is a psychology experiment.
burnte 12y ago
Here's my problem with Scott Adams: he thinks he's a lot more clever than he really is, and he is down right smarmy about it. I've been in the dot-com start up pressure cooker, I'm in another start up right now. The one I was part of over a decade ago needed to pivot and failed, miserably. It didn't have to, but it did. We had great people and a solid foundation, but needed to reorient. We didn't due to management, and it went tits up in no time. Tens of millions of dollars flushed down the toilet. The one I'm part of now, we've only spent a little over $100k, and after a couple setbacks, we're realizing a pivot is needed, but one that actually will save the core of the company and make it more successful. Scott Adams comes in and discovers the idea of pivoting, paints it as a startup concept that he can see through and discover how it's being misused, and writes another pretentious blog post about it. Pivoting has been a business tool for centuries. Nintendo used to make playing cards, Nokia made rubber products and paper, Berkshire Hathaway was a textile mill, AmEx did mail. They all pivoted when the time called for it. What these startups are doing is realizing they have an idea that for whatever reason, they can't pull off. Maybe it's a bad idea, maybe it's the wrong team for the job, whatever. So rather than break up the company, they SAVE THE COMPANY. Just like a human who changes jobs if the need arises, so do companies, which are run by people. They get together as a team, and figure out what they did wrong, and what they can do to fix it, and pivot. They come up with a new plan to save the company. And now Scott Adams makes the realizations that some startups are based on bad ideas, that some react to the market to survive, and that others have taken this as a lesson to realize the objective is to find success rather than hold on to your core idea until you die. And he shares this with us as the benevolent braintrust he is. Scott, open a business textbook written anytime since 1900. This is not a unique nor new idea. Oh, and the Internet IS a technology, it's one that enables many things, like psychological/market experiments, but it's still a technology. Don't think so hard next time, Scott. You'll hurt yourself.
- sirdogealot 12y ago
  I missed the part where Adams championed the pivot as the greatest business innovation of all time. He starts out the article rather casually: "You might be interested in some of the things I've discovered.". If you don't generally care what he has to say, why did you bother to read it? He was only commenting on an interesting aspect of our industry. You don't see too many car companies pivoting to motorcycles, for example. Learning about "the pivot" is interesting reading to a lot of people, just maybe not for you and I.
ejain 12y ago
There's a difference between pivoting to a random new exciting idea when the previous idea doesn't pan out, and pivoting e.g. when you discover that your product happens to have a feature that a significant number of people are willing to pay for.
golergka 12y ago
> Every entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade. The ONLY thing that matters to success in our anything-is-buildable Internet world is psychology. How does the customer perceive this product? What causes someone to share? What makes virality happen? What makes something sticky? That sounds like marketing, not psychology. Of course, marketing is heavily relying on psychology, but still.
- duderific 12y ago
  Marketing is psychology, for all intents and purposes. Nothing is purchased without a decision at some point filtering through a human brain. Marketing is simply the business/economic side of psychology.
klunger 12y ago
This phenomenon was identified in the academic literature on entrepreneurship some time ago. It is called "effectuation". This site has a decent explanation of why and how it occurs: http://effectuation.org/ http://effectuation.org/
deisner 12y ago
Pied Piper needs to pivot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA
spektom 12y ago
From my experience, pivoting does not motivate people who work for a start-up on a salary basis. Once you've made something, which you start liking, your bosses (start-up founders) tell you that they are going to pivot to a different direction. That simply drives away any sense of satisfaction by the work you've done.

516 points by pdsull 12y ago

The internet is a psychology experiment? Well, maybe a tiny fraction of it. You know, those spammy pages where they promise something amazing if only you'll enter your email address. I'm not sure we need more of that. Its like someone pretending to sell brushes wanting in your house, who keeps glancing around casing the joint while blathering some spiel. As a model for qualifying internet product plans, its going to suffer from self-selection of the customers - you know, those lonely people who will talk to anybody, even a brush salesman, and will tell them anything they want to hear.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
"Your browser is a Skinner box" would've been a better title. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
michaelmior 12y ago
Experiments are far broader than landing pages for nonexistent products. The same thing applies to building a working product and realizing it's not what your customers want. Or building a small feature that turns out to be a product in itself. The entire product development process is a bit of a psychology experiment. Try to understand what your customers want, build it. Learn from it. Repeat.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  A small bit of feature isn't much different than nothing. So the salesman shows you a brush - but his sample case is empty. Same issue - its a hoax, designed to waste my time so the guy can case my house, my computer, my needs.
  - michaelmior 12y ago
    Not what I meant. Suppose a company produces brushes. But they find out there a lot of people buying their brushes just to remove the handle and attach it to other things because they happen to really love the handles. Maybe the brush company is in the wrong business.
    - imjustsaying 12y ago
      Right. Which is the advantage of targeted advertising based on user profiles - the customer sees a product they might actually need instead of being offered a free iPhone.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> You know, those spammy pages where they promise something amazing if only you'll enter your email address. You mean, like most of the startups nowdays?

matznerd 12y ago

does anyone else think his site design looks similar to youtube?

MichaelMoser123 12y ago

it has something to do with psychology; it seems that companies that do an ICQ like messenger are going to make it big; Skype, whatsapp, facebook, you get the idea.

drb311 12y ago

Software can now provide just about any user experience quite easily, so the software industry is now all about figuring out what experiences people want. Is that all he's saying?

duderific 12y ago
It's an important point, and it's not just the software industry. If two companies X and Y provide exactly the same or similar service, but company X's user experience is superior, it will probably win out. Consider that Dominos just released the ability to order pizza via a voice operated app. Their pizza is not going to be any better than it was the day before, but by giving people a (supposedly) better way to order, they may be able to take market share away from Round Table or whoever.

aresant 12y ago

"Building a product for the Internet is now the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard part." This feels like a meta-Dilbert joke about how business guys perceive technology & development. As if the "product" is somehow separated from "getting people to understand. . . and use it"

devindotcom 12y ago

If you remove the questionable assumption that most of the ideas are good, isn't it rather kind of institutionalizing "throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick?"

cfield 12y ago
Sort of. It's kind of institutionalizing the process by which you acquire and throw shit. And this is what should be institutionalized if you agree with Scott's premise that "success in the start-up realm is mostly luck".
trhway 12y ago
that is how evolution and natural selection works. Beats intelligent design, at least in the long run and on a large scale.
return0 12y ago
I think it's always been like that, it's just that the internet allows light-speed iteration, hence you see the same phenomenon that would take decades in the past happening within days.
guelo 12y ago
The difference is the analytics. If it's a good startup it's going to learn so much from the shit on the wall that the next pivot will be much more informed and likely to be succesful.
smacktoward 12y ago
Well yes, but as Serious Businesspeople, we need a Serious Business Word to describe the shit-throwing process. Like "pivot."
bengali3 12y ago
I like: "throw enough shit at the wall and you'll learn how to make some of it stick?" because you must learn at every turn
jorleif 12y ago

trhway 12y ago

>building product X and selling the company to Google for a billion dollars. Oh no! it was my secret business plan which i have for several years been working on in my mind during all these hard-to-stay-awake afternoon hours in my cubicle ... opsss... at my desk at highly collaborative (ie. noisy) and innovative (no sane person would do such a space for him/herself) open space at BigCo-s

wdewind 12y ago

For those of us not working on cat photo sharing products for the ever shifting consumer market there is considerably less luck, throwing random stuff at the wall, and pivoting involved. B2B SaaS is pretty nice. Join us on the dark side :)

wlievens 12y ago
The big question is: how do you discover and identify a good b2b problem that needs solving in the first place.
- guelo 12y ago
  Exactly. It's the same. You throw up an idea and start pivoting. If you have a more staid business model some startup will eventually find your niche and out hustle you.
  - wdewind 12y ago
    No, not really. In our (Justworks) case, our founder had to setup payroll, benefits and compliance for multiple companies (Adtuitive and Etsy) and so was intimately familiar with the problem when he started it.
- silverlake 12y ago
  You work in that industry until you understand it intimately and develop connections.
- wdewind 12y ago
  A lot of the "throw it up there and see what happens" movement comes from young engineers who literally lack the life experience to know what problems to solve. Given that scenario, and the intense pressure that comes from SV for young people to succeed, the approach makes sense, but there is a longer term, more considered approach to things. Especially for B2B startups, the best way to come up with an idea is to work at larger businesses and see what problems they are facing. Of course, if you are a young person who knows they want to start a startup, this seems like a roundabout approach, and one that requires a lot of faith. It's hard, and I see why people are attracted to "release, iterate, release," but I don't think it's the best approach. This doesn't mean you don't iterate. A lot of the lean startup stuff is still useful to us (a/b testing for more focused UI etc.). But generally speaking, we know where the product is going, and our customers' needs, often better than them.

aleem 12y ago

Pivot as per the blog post seems to be a mix of extending, innovating and leveraging what you have. I am not bothered by the exact strategy since the concepts are all relevant. Before the word pivot was being bandied about, Microsoft had Hotmail and Hotmail had something like 200 million users (over decade ago). Microsoft released a Hotmail notifier that got prime real estate in your system tray (next to the clock). Most companies knew that the the system tray and the desktop were both prime real estate. The Hotmail Notifier tray icon solved a genuine problem: users knew right away if new mail had arrived. In a future release the Hotmail notifier got extended to a chat application: MSN Messenger. Since Hotmail had lots of users, it managed to take over ICQ and AOL fairly quickly. MSN Messenger tried hard to market other services and products via a constantly displaying ad unit. Messenger then assigned a blog to every user that could be activated within a few clicks. A new blog post by a user would be indicated by a star (internally they were referred to as "gleams"). I recall Microsoft claimed to have become the largest blogging network shortly thereafter though this was probably a numbers game because very few were active bloggers. Microsoft also had other ambitions such as Passport, Shopping, etc but they failed to translate/convert users from the chat window to the browser window. I am not sure if either of those scenarios qualify as pivots in the classical sense. MSN outlived Hotmail though not for long. Passport got mixed reception. MSN shopping didn't take off but Microsoft threw a lot of things out there, hoping something would stick. This is also what Scott's post seems to suggest though I am not sure if this is such a great idea as its costly. MSN has made a loss in nearly every quarter. One observation I drew from this is that if you have passive users, you can do a lot more with them. Social browsing is passive (chat, FB and even email back when chain mails and mail groups didn't face competition from Orkut or Facebook walls). You can throw games, videos, pictures and interest-based activities like restaurants and reviews at passive users. Mail is not a passive medium anymore. That's why Google Drive seems to make sense only some of the time, when I need to collaborate on Google Docs. At other times, it gets in the way, for example, when I want to download certain attachments. Active users rarely deviate from their goal. This would be mostly Google Search users who want to complete the goal of finding something as quickly as possible. These users are definitely much harder to funnel into other services. To capitalise on active users it seems that innovation is key. Google search added the calculator, conversions, weather, scoreboards, etc. I suppose the pivot here is using the search box as user-friendly command line sans the strict syntax. However, forcing these users down a different funnel such as Google+ didn't work well.

e40 12y ago

Success simply can't be predicted to any level of statistical comfort. There are, however, a small percentage of people that consistently succeed. I met a guy like this, and I came to find out he had eliminated a lot of the risk of his software ventures by having a ready-made market for his company among his friends in the venture/banking world. I saw him do it a few times and realized that it was cheating, in a sense. I could replicate the first N-1 steps he did, but that last one required an in with the right crowd, which I didn't have.

klochner 12y ago
The luck thing mostly applies to consumer internet, see the comment [1] from wdewind elsewhere in this thread. For B2B/SaaS you can lower the risk a lot, especially if a team member has domain knowledge and industry connections. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7901437
imgabe 12y ago
Given a large enough population with random outcomes, of course a small percentage will consistently succeed.
- nickpinkston 12y ago
  It's not ALL luck - some people do way better than rolling the dice alone would suggest. Of course, it's very hard to measure this and know if you're one of those people.
  - NhanH 12y ago
    I don't think anyone would say it's all luck. People with skill will do better than the AVERAGE rolls. But with a large enough population, some one will be able to get all 6 out of a hundred rolls just by luck. Given a success list alone you can't tell if it's luck or skill.
  - imgabe 12y ago
    I'm not saying it's all luck, but if you have a million people rolling dice, some percentage of them will have a lucky streak doing "better than rolling dice would suggest". A random outcome doesn't mean every individual gets the average result every time.

peterwwillis 12y ago

So, at a basic level, a pivot is just a field experiment without a control? Or is it an observational study?

return0 12y ago
I think it's another word for "moving on"
yid 12y ago
It's just another step in a stochastic optimization algorithm.

noname123 12y ago

Man can't wait for someone to build a pivoting web framework on Github, where I can build a subscription based service and then switch whatever the product is with the data schema, and the pricing and the description page changes. Basically a framework that already has Stripe/Paypal payment integration to charge a user's CC, a schema for a informational or subscription-based product that I can modify pricing and description for, and some front-end templates to modify the landing page and call to action and A/B testing analytics for me to optimize on conversion. Kinda of like A/B testing but hedging my bets and executing all of my business ideas at once!

sjg007 12y ago
Kida like wufoo but instead wuApp.
nileshtrivedi 12y ago
We need a DSL for creating tech startups!

silverlake 12y ago

Consumer internet startups are like Hollywood entertainment. No one knows what TV shows or movies will be successful. The industry tries to make smart bets: invest in big name directors or actors, or sequels or copycats or cheap reality shows, but it's still a gamble. Successful shows come out of nowhere. So they keep trying random shows every season and see which ones stick. Doesn't this sound like Silicon Valley?

bengali3 12y ago
I agree that it is similar, but that's the nature of all businesses, right? Prior performance is used all over the business world to justify decisions. I'm sure you've heard "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" Investment = risk, everyone wants to minimize it while maximizing the upside. From this blog post, it sounds like the ability to pivot smart and fast ( fast failing.. that rings a bell..) could enhance ones probability of success. And the ability to pivot away from your 'baby' into the scary unknown again takes a special kind of skill - Letting Go aka: know when to fold 'em.

dueprocess 12y ago

It doesn't sound like a psychology experiment Scott is talking about, but a "stumble-upon" strategy. Psychology is a little more elegant than just pivot, pivot, pivot.

crawshaw 12y ago

This notion of commodity technology doesn't apply to every startup. Boston Dynamics was not a company slapping together commodity technology and testing user behavior. But it does apply to a lot of startups. And that's why I work for a big company, because I'm here for long-term big change, not fashion and profit.

natural219 12y ago

This is a great blog post, but I want to point out that this is not a new idea, just a way to express an old idea using new terms ("pivot", "startups", etc.) What Scott is trying to express is that, in a capitalist economy, money is the goal. The process of getting money, once technical innovation is subtracted, is called Marketing. The process of doing Marketing is to understand psychology -- given a set of craftable stimuli, how can you influence the ape to swipe her credit card.

jasoncartwright 12y ago
Absolutely - just happens faster. Nokia was a paper mill (1865), Suzuki made looms (1910), Mannesmann produced steel tubes (1890), and Berkshire Hathaway did textile manufacturing (1839)

Spearchucker 12y ago

In 2010 Ross Anderson pointed out (stated rather emphatically actually) that security is driven by only two things - psychology and economics. Software is no different. Security Engineering - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B004BDOZI0/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1402956046&sr=8-2&pi=SL75 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B004BDOZI0/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qi...

plainOldText 12y ago
Or if you want to read it online for free: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

triplesec 12y ago

do remember that this guy is a comedian... so this I see as pithy satire more than actual analysis. As such it's pretty good

callmeed 12y ago

> And then they find out that success in the start-up realm is mostly luck. They discover this by trying great ideas coupled with great execution and failing. While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Or, there is at least some severe cognitive dissonance going on when they begin to discover it. Even "the pivot" itself was made popular by The Lean Startup–the book that many take as the formula for startup success (very much the antithesis of luck). Yes, you have to hustle. Yes, you have to build something people want. Yes, you should have an awesome team. When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. ("I couldn't get funding", "Google changed their algorithm", "I couldn't hire the right person for X") Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can't code as good as you and didn't go to as good a school as you–then it was most definitely luck.

rmrfrmrf 12y ago
> While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Probably because it's not exactly true. The whole point of all that data is to see which aspects of a business work and which parts don't. The author is describing pivots a bit hyperbolically for the sake of drama/artistic license, but it's not like the C-level executives pivot by rolling the dice and seeing what they come up with. A successful pivot works by observing which parts work, dropping the parts that don't work, and building up the parts that people like. Think about the last SV product/service you purchased. Did you buy it because you had a random thought, or did you buy it because it actually solved a need of yours?
- hmsimha 12y ago
  Succeeding in the startup world is luck like succeeding in poker is luck. Sure, there is an element of luck undeniably involved, but in the long term, raw talent should play a significant role as well.
  - HNJohnC 12y ago
    I suspect you might not be paying enough attention to the issue.

cpncrunch 12y ago

I'm a little disappointed...I expected to see a cartoon.

mhartl 12y ago

I wonder if there's a way for startups to systematize Adams's insight that "[e]very entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade" by hiring professional psychologists.

nbarry 12y ago

It reminds me of Jim Collins' concept (not original to him, I know) of shooting lots of little bullets and seeing which one hits, rather than wasting gunpowder on one big cannonball before you're even sure you're aimed in the right direction. Except he mostly used that concept to describe how companies decide which individual products or strategies to focus on, while the idea of a pivot is that you shift your entire company to do something else. (Reminds me of another Collins metaphor - it's important to get the right people on the bus first, and then you can decide together where to drive.)

haomiao 12y ago

What the author (and really everyone in the Valley) is referring to as "luck" is that fundamentally the whole process is stochastic: there's an unavoidable randomness. Probability is involved. Now, mini rant here: whenever people talk about something being random there's a sense that it's COMPLETELY random: the probability distribution is uniform and anything can happen. Lottery tickets, throwing dice, flipping coins. And, not to put too fine a point on it, that is COMPLETELY, UTTERLY WRONG. Saying there's probabilistic uncertainty in something doesn't mean the distributions are uniform. It just means given all the inputs you can't always predict all the outputs. No matter what you do, no matter what happens, the result can be one of many things. 1 or 0. Success or failure. This doesn't mean you can't DO SOMETHING about it though, and that's precisely what people are doing. Figure out the patterns, cut through the uncertainty, and try to find your way to the promised land. What the author's describing using the language of social science and valley speak is the same thing that the machine learning/AI/robotics community learned in the past few decades. They started out with formal logics and rigid rules, and they learned that to succeed in a random world, you have to embrace the randomness. Build it deeply into your systems and processes and all of a sudden you start performing better than your wildest expectations. Model, measure, evaluate, pivot, repeat. That's pretty damn familiar. What's it describing? A closed loop control system. Change the terminology a bit and you're talking about a Kalman filter with a feedback controller. What's a learning algorithm but a way to fit patterns to noisy, partially random data? And that's what this is all about. Luck doesn't mean it's all random, just that you can't control everything. And being good doesn't mean you eliminate the randomness, it means finding the patterns and making randomness work for you. Is there randomness in poker? Sure. Of course. But there's a shit ton of skill too (I know, because I don't have any of it). Don't confuse a poker game for a game of dice.

ritchiea 12y ago

What really bothers me about this type of thinking is the assumption that every team is equally talented & motivated. I might go as far as saying the talent/intelligence landscape is somewhat homogenous but having been around early stage startups for years now there is definitely a power law distribution of motivation & organization. It's a lot easier to say you will do anything to succeed and act the part and struggle and listen to your investors like they're bosses and let your startup die out while going through the motions than it is to be relentlessly resourceful. It also benefits to be self critical and unattached to an ideal of a product in a way to allow your product to be what your users respond to rather than some stubborn vision. All this to say, there are definitely a ton of bad startups out there, people who see an easy fundraising landscape, take advantage of connections or even make them. Or people that get to a certain point and don't really want to face reality. Instead of floating all the platitudes we float about there being lots of talented teams, it would be nice to see some honesty. That a lot of startups have a founder or two that isn't that dedicated but is there because he/she isn't sure what else to be doing. That a lot of startups are a vanity project of one of the founders and the founder doesn't have the modesty to actually sell to users/potential employees. That at a lot of startups there is friction between the founders that puts the product in danger because they have equal-ish power but between them lack a coherent vision for the future. And a lot of these companies with bad foundations have brilliant founders. Just because companies are founded by smart people doesn't mean they have a strong foundation. That is something we should be honest about. This isn't to say that it doesn't take luck, but there is a lot that helps to get right that a lot of startups aren't getting right off the bat.

swanson 12y ago
A slight spin on that assumption that I've seen in some lean startup materials is to assume that "software delivery is constant and guaranteed" - which is used to help move the identification of risk away from technology and towards the business viability. In that case, I think it is somewhat useful, but speaking as a software developer - it is very rarely the case that a software project goes as smoothly and reliably as a fancy pitch deck makes it out to be. It is easy to say things like "small iterations", "continuous delivery", "move fast", etc but much harder to, you know, do them. Any old team thrown together off the street is not going to have that skillset to achieve that. I don't think it entirely discounts the ideas or concepts, but I certainly gives me pause.

drivingmenuts 12y ago

"quality is less important than speed" So, we're producing crap ... but it's really quick crap quickly crapped.

yiedyie 12y ago

TL;DR > Internet is no longer a technology. The Internet is a psychology experiment.

burnte 12y ago

Here's my problem with Scott Adams: he thinks he's a lot more clever than he really is, and he is down right smarmy about it. I've been in the dot-com start up pressure cooker, I'm in another start up right now. The one I was part of over a decade ago needed to pivot and failed, miserably. It didn't have to, but it did. We had great people and a solid foundation, but needed to reorient. We didn't due to management, and it went tits up in no time. Tens of millions of dollars flushed down the toilet. The one I'm part of now, we've only spent a little over $100k, and after a couple setbacks, we're realizing a pivot is needed, but one that actually will save the core of the company and make it more successful. Scott Adams comes in and discovers the idea of pivoting, paints it as a startup concept that he can see through and discover how it's being misused, and writes another pretentious blog post about it. Pivoting has been a business tool for centuries. Nintendo used to make playing cards, Nokia made rubber products and paper, Berkshire Hathaway was a textile mill, AmEx did mail. They all pivoted when the time called for it. What these startups are doing is realizing they have an idea that for whatever reason, they can't pull off. Maybe it's a bad idea, maybe it's the wrong team for the job, whatever. So rather than break up the company, they SAVE THE COMPANY. Just like a human who changes jobs if the need arises, so do companies, which are run by people. They get together as a team, and figure out what they did wrong, and what they can do to fix it, and pivot. They come up with a new plan to save the company. And now Scott Adams makes the realizations that some startups are based on bad ideas, that some react to the market to survive, and that others have taken this as a lesson to realize the objective is to find success rather than hold on to your core idea until you die. And he shares this with us as the benevolent braintrust he is. Scott, open a business textbook written anytime since 1900. This is not a unique nor new idea. Oh, and the Internet IS a technology, it's one that enables many things, like psychological/market experiments, but it's still a technology. Don't think so hard next time, Scott. You'll hurt yourself.

sirdogealot 12y ago
I missed the part where Adams championed the pivot as the greatest business innovation of all time. He starts out the article rather casually: "You might be interested in some of the things I've discovered.". If you don't generally care what he has to say, why did you bother to read it? He was only commenting on an interesting aspect of our industry. You don't see too many car companies pivoting to motorcycles, for example. Learning about "the pivot" is interesting reading to a lot of people, just maybe not for you and I.

ejain 12y ago

There's a difference between pivoting to a random new exciting idea when the previous idea doesn't pan out, and pivoting e.g. when you discover that your product happens to have a feature that a significant number of people are willing to pay for.

golergka 12y ago

> Every entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade. The ONLY thing that matters to success in our anything-is-buildable Internet world is psychology. How does the customer perceive this product? What causes someone to share? What makes virality happen? What makes something sticky? That sounds like marketing, not psychology. Of course, marketing is heavily relying on psychology, but still.

duderific 12y ago
Marketing is psychology, for all intents and purposes. Nothing is purchased without a decision at some point filtering through a human brain. Marketing is simply the business/economic side of psychology.

klunger 12y ago

This phenomenon was identified in the academic literature on entrepreneurship some time ago. It is called "effectuation". This site has a decent explanation of why and how it occurs: http://effectuation.org/ http://effectuation.org/

deisner 12y ago

Pied Piper needs to pivot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA

spektom 12y ago

From my experience, pivoting does not motivate people who work for a start-up on a salary basis. Once you've made something, which you start liking, your bosses (start-up founders) tell you that they are going to pivot to a different direction. That simply drives away any sense of satisfaction by the work you've done.