Every Big Company Pivoted
Balaji Srinivasan rattled off pivot after pivot to make his point.
Srinivasan: "YouTube -- does anybody know what YouTube was at the very beginning? It was a dating site. You can go to web.archive.org and look at it. PayPal was originally beaming money between Palm Pilots and then they found the web thing was taking off and they went and did that. Slack? It was a game."
Srinivasan: "Opsware, which Ben Horowitz sold for $1.6 billion, was LoudCloud -- this massive data center operation which had raised a ton of money during the dot-com boom and went all the way down and then came all the way back up."
YouTube was a dating site. PayPal was beaming money between Palm Pilots. Slack was a game. Opsware was LoudCloud.
Even Google Pivoted
Srinivasan: "Even Google initially thought it was going to make its money from enterprise search and the enterprise search appliance. That was a non-starter. And actually Overture came up with the concept of auctioning ads and Google basically copied them and executed it better."
The biggest company on the internet got its business model from someone else. That's Balaji's point. Nobody gets it right the first time.
Even Google initially thought it was going to make its money from enterprise search. That was a non-starter.
Runway Means You're Alive
Srinivasan: "You iterate until you achieve product-market fit and then you accelerate. My answer is: if you have the runway, you're not dead. You iterate until you survive and thrive, and then you grow, and then you become big. That's worked for many other people and hopefully it'll work for you guys."
If you have the runway, you're not dead. You iterate until you survive and thrive, and then you grow, and then you become big.