fikrikarim / companies-with-successful-pivot Goto Github PK

Company Name?
Soylent

What's the company main business today?
Meal replacement, nutrition

What did the company do in the early days?
Inexpensive cell phone towers. They received $170,000 from YCombinator.

What caused the company to pivot?
Cell phone towers were too hard to break into, the founders ran out of money, but still had to eat, so they played around with a meal replacement formula, and invented "Soylent".

Source?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/the-end-of-food

https://gaincompliance.com/blog/pivots-and-plans/

Company Name?
Pixar

What's the company main business today?
Computer Animated Movies

What did the company do in the early days?
Sold hardware for computer animation.

What caused the company to pivot?
Insufficient sales of hardware product.

Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar

Company Name?

Cisco Systems

What's the company main business today?

routers and other networking gear

What did the company do in the early days?

Business plan was to build clone of PDP-10 mainframe. Sold some SUNet routers to fund the effort.

What caused the company to pivot?

people really liked routers while the PDP-10’s heyday had passed.

Source?

many articles at the time; part of founding team went on to pursue the original plan via company XKL. Might have been the pivot that inspired the concept. Probably the most famous pivot in SV history.

Berkshire Hathaway

multinational conglomerate holding company

Textile mills

Waning textile industry in America

Source

Company Name?
Okta

What's the company main business today?
Identity Management

What did the company do in the early days?
monitoring and reporting on the reliability of cloud services

What caused the company to pivot?
customer demand, "it was unscalable"

Source?
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/375105

Not quite a "pivot" as this company never stepped away from making games, but Blizzard did make one very important decision in its early days

Company Name?
Blizzard (originally Silicon and Synapse)

What's the company main business today?
Video and computer games based on original IP.

What did the company do in the early days?
Videogames based on licensed IP.

What caused the company to pivot?
In the early 90s, the company made the console games "Death and Return of Superman" and "Justice League Task Force" for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis based on DC Comics characters. The licensing deal was so onerous, that the company decided that for its next two projects, rather than license IP for the tabletop "Warhammer" and "Warhammer 40k" games from Games Workshop, they would make their own fantasy worlds "Warcraft" and "Starcraft"

Source?
https://kotaku.com/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-5929161
https://kotaku.com/the-inside-story-of-the-making-of-warcraft-part-1-5929157

Company Name?
Polaroid

What's the company main business today?
Instant cameras

What did the company do in the early days?
Polarized lenses and optics for the armed forces.

What caused the company to pivot?
Edwin Land effectively invented one of the first commercially viable processes for creating polarized lenses which he sold to the armed forces for making sunglasses for aviators. Spending most of World War 2 prototyping techniques for night vision and improved optics, after the war, Polaroid pivoted into making instant cameras. Failure to pivot into digital cameras resulted in the bankruptcy of the company several years after the founder passed away.

Source?

Company Name?
Audible

What's the company main business today?
American online audiobook and podcast service that allows users to purchase and stream audiobooks and other forms of spoken word content.

What did the company do in the early days?
The company's first product was portable media player known as the Audible Player; released in 1998, the device contained around 4 megabytes of on-board flash storage, which could hold up to two hours of audio.

What caused the company to pivot?
Hardware is hard - they had trouble competing with other companies who simply did hardware better (e.g. Apple). So they instead licensed audio codec technology and focused on developing content.

Source?
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/29/1050511655/audible-don-katz
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/23/business/his-dream-is-that-we-ll-all-hear-little-voices.html
many more at the infamous... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible_(service)

Company Name?
Microsoft

What's the company main business today?
Operating systems (mostly?)

What did the company do in the early days?
"read the raw data from roadway traffic counters and create reports for traffic engineers"

What caused the company to pivot?
They "had only modest success but the experience was instrumental in the creation of Microsoft Corporation a few years later":
https://web.archive.org/web/20120323162239/http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/story.php?ii=45

Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data

Blackberry

Highly secured real time operating systems

Produced smartphones and Bluetooth devices

They started loosing a lot of market share to the other phone providers.

Wikipedia/company website

Company Name?

ZipLine

What's the company main business today?

Zipline is an American medical product delivery company that is headquartered in South San Francisco, California, which designs, manufactures, and operates delivery drones. The company operates distribution centers in Rwanda, Ghana, and the US.

What did the company do in the early days?
A mini-robot powered by your phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQEEMpzPZlY

What caused the company to pivot?
N/A

Source?

Mazda

Automobile manufacturer

Cork-maker as Toyo Cork Kogyo Co., Ltd

Bankruptcy. They needed a pivot so they restarted as car manufacturer in 1931 introducing a motorised rickshaw

Source?

Amazon was initially an online bookstore.

It's entire AWS business is result of an attempt to create ideal online shopping basket.

Company Name?

Upstart

What's the company main business today?

Direct to consumer lending

What did the company do in the early days?

Allow people to sell their future earnings for cash today, usually to repay student debt.

What caused the company to pivot?

Everyone believes they'll make a million dollars a year someday.

Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart_(company)

After bringing up Tandy, IBM, and Polaroid (blasts from the past), why not bring up less conventional companies?

Company Name?
Guadalajara Cartel

What's the company main business today?
Defunct, but in it's heydey, controlled a virtual monopoly on cocaine imports to the United States -- a far more lucrative (and deadly) source of income

What did the company do in the early days?
Marijuana plantations

What caused the company to pivot?
US federal crackdown on drug trafficking routes through the bahamas and marijuana plantations in Mexico forced Colombian drug traffickers to move cocaine through Mexico instead

Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalajara_Cartel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_%C3%81ngel_F%C3%A9lix_Gallardo

Company Name?
Toyota

What's the company main business today?
automobile manufacturer

What did the company do in the early days?
manufactured automatic looms

What caused the company to pivot?
Son inherited the business and wanted to establish success independent of his father's, and believed the automobile industry would grow. He sold the loom patents to raise capital.

Source?
Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology in Nagoya, Japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiichiro_Toyoda

Company Name?

IBM

What's the company main business today?

IT services, cloud computing, and enterprise software

What did the company do in the early days?

Sell physical, punch card based tabulating machines.

What caused the company to pivot?

Computers

Source?

https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/tabulator/

Fitting with my previous post, it might be interesting to point out some less wholesome (non-tech company) pivots

Company Name?
Purdue Pharmaceuticals

What's the company main business today?
Bankrupt, but at its peak, the company made billions by selling highly addictive opioids to unassuming Americans leading to tens of thousands of deaths.

What did the company do in the early days?
Founded in 1892 by by medical doctors John Purdue Gray and George Frederick Bingham, the company originally sold earwax removers and laxatives.

What caused the company to pivot?
The company was purchased by the Sackler brothers 60 years after its founding. The brothers used the company to distribute and promote opiate derivatives such as Oxycontin.

Source?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45345199
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
https://westfaironline.com/health-care/dr-raymond-sackler-co-owner-purdue-pharma-dies-97/

Company Name?

What's the company main business today?
Warren Buffet's multi-national conglomerate holding company

They own companies such as GEICO and Duracell, and they have significant holdings in public companies including Coca-Cola, Kraft, AMEX, Bank of America, and Apple.

What did the company do in the early days?
Textile manufacturing

What caused the company to pivot?
Basically Buffet was day trading the company. Stanton (running Berkshire Hathaway at the time) then tried to buy him out, but Buffet's offer was undercut at the last minute. Angry by this, Buffet bought a controlling interest in the company and fired him. He then started to pivot from the failing textile business by acquiring a couple of insurance companies (including GEICO). Using capital generated from the insurance business, he continued to reinvest in the many companies they own today.

Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway

Company Name?
American Express

What's the company main business today?
Credit cards, banking, financial services.

What did the company do in the early days?
It was a package delivery service! Mostly employing "Expressmen" who carried packages on trains from one city to another.

What caused the company to pivot?
They were accused of anticompetitive behaviour like price gouging, and the government literally stripped the Express side of the business from them and nationalised it. Luckily for them they had invented the travelers cheque and money order by then, so they pivoted into becoming mainly a financial services business rather than logistics — mostly against their will.

Source?
American Express by Peter Grossman

Company Name?
Radioshack/Tandy

What's the company main business today?
Leather goods (but for a while, electronics)

What did the company do in the early days?
Leather goods

What caused the company to pivot?
Tandy originally made leather goods for the hobby market. As electronics grew as a hobby in the 70s and 80s, Tandy acquired a small, failing electronics store in Boston called Radioshack. The Tandy TRS-80 was one of the first microcomputers and Radioshack was synonymous with hobby electronics until it went defunct. Tandy Leathergoods still exists today.

Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Corporation

Company Name?

Mentor Graphics

What's the company main business today?

Electronic design automation and CAD Software

What did the company do in the early days?

Sold turn-key CAD workstations (i.e. pre-installed EDA and CAD software, pre-configured network, on Apollo (Unix-like) workstations.

What caused the company to pivot?

Selling workstations with pre-installed software made sense in the 1980s because often the customers had no other computers (except for finance's mainframe) and certainly no LAN. New competitors sold just software and thus had lower overhead and thus a business model that was more friendly to Wall St. analysts. At the same time customers got more sophisticated they didn't need the white-glove, managed, workstations.

Source?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_Graphics