{"id":20839,"date":"2020-11-03T14:19:52","date_gmt":"2020-11-03T19:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/how-startups-can-shake-up-their-first-idea-and-still-crush-the-market\/"},"modified":"2020-11-03T14:19:52","modified_gmt":"2020-11-03T19:19:52","slug":"how-startups-can-shake-up-their-first-idea-and-still-crush-the-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/how-startups-can-shake-up-their-first-idea-and-still-crush-the-market\/","title":{"rendered":"How startups can shake up their first idea and still crush the market"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"8ad62c3a0ef3fdfd37e330a4d3170eb2\" data-index=\"1\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- first 1 -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6893006633895851\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"3313541086\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<p>\t\t\tOftentimes it pays to pivot and start again<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\tWhen Quibi announced it was shutting its doors recently after raising $1.75 billion, it begged an obvious question: If the original idea didn\u2019t work, why not adjust its model or do something completely different while it still had capital? It wouldn\u2019t have been the first company to decide to shift gears. Perhaps because of the unusually large amount of money it burned through in just six months of public operation, pivoting wasn\u2019t an option for Quibi, but it has been for countless other successful companies over the years.\u00a0Sometimes an original idea simply doesn\u2019t pan out, a market gets too crowded or a company\u2019s founders stumble onto something they have built that is actually a better business than the original idea.<br \/>\nThere are many such examples:<\/p><div class=\"8ad62c3a0ef3fdfd37e330a4d3170eb2\" data-index=\"2\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6893006633895851\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- 2nd display -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6893006633895851\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"2190937813\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n\n<p>Perhaps the most famous is Slack, which originally was a multiplayer online game before pivoting to be a communications company.<br \/>\nBox launched in 2005 as a consumer storage product before deciding to take on content management in the enterprise in 2008.<br \/>\nYouTube started life as a video dating service and when they didn\u2019t get much traction they began letting people upload whatever videos they liked. Google saw enough potential to buy the company for $1.6 billion just a year after launching.<\/p>\n<p>These examples \u2014 and many more \u2014 show that when your first approach doesn\u2019t work, pivoting may be the the only logical course, but it takes courage from founders and patience from investors.<br \/>\nWe spoke to several founders and VCs who have been through this to find out how pivots happen, and how all the parties involved adjust to shifting priorities.<br \/>\nSometimes it\u2019s a long and twisting road<br \/>\nA big part of founding a company is having vision. You need to believe in your idea of course, but that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s the right way to go. Sometimes it pays to move on. The king of pivots might be the aptly named Pivotal, which changed direction several times and even swapped owners before it went public and got acquired, all in the span of about 20 years. Ed Sim, co-founder at boldstart ventures was part of Dawntreader Ventures in the late 90s when his firm invested in an early version of the company called Metapa. Sim had a front row seat to every twist and turn in the company\u2019s long and intricate history.<br \/>\n\u201cGreenplum, which was sold to EMC and eventually became Pivotal Software, was initially called Metapa. Metapa was in the Akamai space and as the markets cratered in 2001 for funding infrastructure projects, Scott Yara (the company\u2019s founder) and team bought a small company called Didera and turned it into Greenplum, the first petabyte scale data warehouse built on top of open-source technology,\u201d Sim told TechCrunch. It didn\u2019t end there though as Sim continued, \u201cOnce again, years later, Scott recruited his replacement CEO, Bill Cook, and they paired together to sell Greenplum to EMC and eventually spin back out and take the company public as Pivotal Software.\u201d<br \/>\nIt\u2019s worth noting that Pivotal  eventually ran into financial problems when its stock tanked last year, but fellow Dell\/EMC family member VMware saved the day by acquiring it for $2.7 billion.<br \/>\nSometimes you stumble onto an idea<br \/>\nSegment,  the customer-data platform company that was recently sold to Twilio for $3.2 billion was originally a college lecture sentiment platform, according to CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt. \u201cOur first idea was a classroom lecture tool, ClassMetric, which gave students a button they could press in class to let professors know, in real-time, that they were confused. I like to think of it like a pulse monitor for class confusion,\u201d Reinhardt told TechCrunch<br \/>\nThat idea quickly failed when professors testing it found that inviting students to open their laptops to test their sentiment just led them to start playing Solitaire or checking Facebook. Professors weren\u2019t thrilled and they moved on. The founders, who were MIT students at the time, decided they wanted to build an analytics tool instead, but it turned out that competition from Google Analytics and Mixpanel at the time proved too steep.<br \/>\n\u201cWe spent a year on development, but it was a crowded market and we struggled to carve out our own niche. We were rapidly running out of capital and the pressure was on to find something new,\u201d he said. They were actually considering simply packing it in, but they had developed a tiny open-source tool called analytics.js, which they used to get data into their failed analytics product. At that point, desperate for an idea, one of the founders suggested posting the open-source tool on Hacker News.\t\t\t<\/p><div class=\"8ad62c3a0ef3fdfd37e330a4d3170eb2\" data-index=\"3\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6893006633895851\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- 2nd display -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6893006633895851\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"2190937813\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oftentimes it pays to pivot and start again When Quibi announced it was shutting its doors recently after raising $1.75 billion, it begged an obvious question: If the original idea didn\u2019t work, why not adjust its model or do something completely different while it still had capital? It wouldn\u2019t have been the first company to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":20840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11904],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/20839\/how-startups-can-shake-up-their-first-idea-and-still-crush-the-market.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7w8St-5q7","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20839"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morningsidemaryland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}