PIVOT

I failed at making video games twice. Both times, something better came out of it.

We almost died in 2015. I laid off everyone and moved to Kyoto with one engineer. It was the best decision I ever made.

We shipped Magic Leap One and sold maybe 6,000 units. That's not a consumer product launch. That's an expensive science experiment. The pivot to enterprise saved the company.

We went to Y Combinator with a VR idea. Two weeks in, we killed it and pivoted to corporate cards. YC said: you're insane. Then they backed us.

We started as a chatbot app for teenagers. It failed. Then we open-sourced our NLP library and accidentally became the GitHub of machine learning. Best pivot in AI history.

We laid off people. We restructured. We pivoted to enterprise. Everyone wrote us off. But we're still here, still growing, and still profitable. In AI, survival is underrated.

I started this company in 1999. It lasted 18 years. We went through Bluetooth headsets, speakers, fitness trackers, and clinical health. The pivot never stopped. Maybe that was the problem.

We started in 1998 making loyalty cards for petroleum companies. Loyalty cards. Then we pivoted to payment terminals. Then to merchant commerce. Every decade, we reinvent ourselves.

William and I started by building a budgeting app. It was bad. But the bank connection layer we built for it was really good. So we killed the app and sold the plumbing. Best pivot decision we ever made.

The student loan pause almost killed us. The government froze student loan payments for three years. Our core product — student loan refinancing — went to zero overnight. We survived by diversifying fast enough.

We started as a plagiarism detection tool for universities. Turns out helping people write better was a much bigger business than catching people who write badly.

We pivoted from user testing to video messaging. The pivot felt terrifying at the time. It turned out to be a $975 million decision.

We are rebuilding. Smaller team, clearer focus. The audio format has a future, even if the hype cycle is over.

Before Roblox I built physics simulations for education. Turns out kids would rather build their own worlds than study mine.

We threw out our entire product and started over. It was terrifying. It was also the best decision we ever made.

Framer as a prototyping tool was good. Framer as a website builder is transformative.

We are pivoting from consumer to enterprise. Companies will pay for their employees mental health. That is a better business than convincing individuals one at a time.

Fifteen million users signed up. Then we had to explain why they should pay us when ChatGPT exists. That is the hardest pivot in AI.

We pivoted from consumer to enterprise. The consumer AI writing market is dead. Enterprise AI workflows are alive.

The future of AI copywriting is not writing copy. It is automating entire go-to-market workflows. That is where the value is.

Two billion dollars. That is the valuation for a drone company that started trying to film skateboarders.

MIT taught us robotics. The market taught us business. Consumer drones did not work. Defense drones do.

We built a drone that flies itself through a forest without hitting a tree. Then we realized the military pays a lot more than consumers for that capability.

We laid off hundreds of junior developers when we pivoted from training to marketplace. That was the hardest day of my career.

Our voice app failed. But the analytics tools we built to understand why it failed became a billion-dollar company.

DTC-only was a ceiling. Going into Whole Foods and Target gave us the scale we needed.

We pivoted from rockets to spacecraft propulsion. Sometimes the best business is selling shovels, not digging for gold.

A 95% stock decline is hard to explain to shareholders. Pivoting to a better business is how we earn trust back.

The enterprise pivot is working. Companies running MySQL at massive scale need Vitess expertise. We have it.

We processed millions of COVID tests during the pandemic. That infrastructure now powers our cancer screening platform.

We've pivoted multiple times — genetic testing, COVID testing, cancer screening. Each time toward a bigger problem.

Justin.tv was everything to everyone. Twitch was gaming only. Focus is how we won.

We didn't set out to build a chat tool. We set out to build a game. But the chat tool was what actually worked.

I took over a cooking oil company at 21 and turned it into an IT company. People called me mad.

We went from Grofers to Blinkit — from next-day to 10-minute. Same team, completely different company.

We built M-Pesa for loan repayments. Users decided it was for sending money to family. They were right.

ChatGPT changed the conversation. We had to pivot from AutoML to AI governance — fast.

The pivot to marketplace came too late. By then, the brand was damaged and the cash was gone.

We fought Uber to a standstill in India. Now we're building electric scooters. Same fight, different vehicle.

The pivot to asset-light listing services is the right move. Owning houses was the wrong move.

Ride-hailing might never make money. Electric vehicles definitely will. That's why we pivoted.

We pivoted from consumer to enterprise in 2009. That decision saved the company. Consumer storage became free. Enterprise storage became a billion-dollar business.

SARS shut down offline retail in 2003. I moved my business online. The worst crisis became the best opportunity.

ETHLend was wrong. Peer-to-peer matching doesn't scale. Pooled lending does. The pivot saved everything.

I failed at consumer delivery first. DoorDash for groceries in India doesn't work when order values are $3. B2B was the pivot that saved us.

I spent twenty-four years advising bankrupt companies. Then I realized I should be buying them.