A Brief Guide to Startup Pivots
One interesting thing I&#x27;ve learned from studying the history of several dozen startups and from doing about 20 pivots myself is that oftentimes the startup doesn&#x27;t pivot into the market, the market (or technology) pivots into the startup.  In other words, the startup is non-viable at the time of its founding, but later events change the structure of the market in a way that takes the struggling business and turns it into a growth powerhouse.<p>Google, Whatsapp, Uber, Twitch, AirBnB, EverNote, Roblox, and to some extent Apple can all be seen as examples of this.<p>This has a bunch of implications for what it&#x27;s really like to found a startup: in particular, it validates the wisdom of keeping burn rate extremely low and of being extremely persistent, as well as having a product out there that people can use.  It also suggests that it may be better to have a lot of usable-but-unpolished working products that are constantly getting exposure (even if they&#x27;re not succeeding), rather than putting all your eggs into improving one product, and argues for putting failed startups in maintenance-mode rather than shuttering them entirely.