@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 3:25

The Art of the Pivot

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Whether a startup or as an entrepreneurial team within a large organization, I have a thesis that many innovation teams and startups come tantalizingly close to success, but since the people funding them do not give them the mandate to Pivot, what could have been a runaway success ends up being shut down prematurely. And if that thesis is true, that means that investors and large organizations really need to rethink their approach to innovation spending

#AskAFounder #startups #innovation #investing

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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 2:06
And I think it was in one of the tech shows where they kind of really heavily promoted it that Twitter really picked up. And the other pivot that should have happened that didn't happen. And the investors or the parent company totally lost out on is the infamous Xerox Park and the GUI interfaces that Steve Jobs conveniently came in and stole from them, or rather like, just got inspired and requested. Yup. That's all I had to add
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@Howie
Howie Rubin
@Howie · 0:41
I think there are a couple of important skill sets that you have to have in order to be an entrepreneur, to start a company or to be an effective product manager to start a new line of products within an existing company. These are as far as I'm concerned. Number one, you have to have a good work ethic. Number two, you really have to be a very, very good listener. You have to take that listening and you have to be extremely flexible
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@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 2:25

#perseverance

I really love this topic. And one of the keys to success of a great entrepreneur, I think is knowing when and how to pivot. And I've always been amazed by that because I always also think that perseverance is definitely something that an entrepreneur needs as well. So at some point, when does that perseverance and reality sit in to say, okay, we need to pivot and go here because you have to really believe in an idea to go through with it. You have your business going
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@sshekhar
Shashank Shekhar
@sshekhar · 2:48
Now, it may be that is someone willing to pay for it, or is someone willing to pay $100 for it or whatever? So the underlying assumption can change. It may be a change of scale, or it may be a qualitative change in what you are assuming about your startup
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@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 1:57

@phil

Hi Phil, regarding a question about how hard it is to actually execute on a pivot. Once you realize and given kind of the tradeoff between persevering with what you're doing and taking the call to change and move, move away. I think she's kind of partially answered that. If you really are open to looking at what signals you're getting from outside and are willing to change, the decision becomes easier in real life
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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:01

@arish intuition & art?

And so I'm wondering potentially how intuition and feeling also play into the art of the pivot and how that works with considering data as well. So anything you have to add about that would be really interesting for me. So thank you
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@divya_24
Divya Chachra
@divya_24 · 0:35
Hello everyone. I'm Divya, founder of Miu Designer Boutique Koematur. The word boutique is directly proportional to the cost, but we did it pivot of bringing it to all common users without compromising the quality. And we are still running successfully with very less cost. Now we are doing one more Pivot, which is taking boutique business to digital online. Bottom line is when you believe in your quality, anything is possible. Possible. Thank you
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@arish
Arish Ali
@arish · 1:52

@rachel - yes, it is a creative process, informed by a creative vision

There's a product you're trying to build and trying to create, and it requires and that vision might change and you may feel like this is what I'm trying to finally get to
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@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 5:00
I have gone through at least two of those in my previous company, and I don't think I've really gone through life or death Pivots per se in our current company, but a lot more than mini ones. And the other pivots are what I would call mini pivots. These are pivots where as a business, you are constantly exploring avenues either for growth and eventually may result in a major shift of the business itself, but they often start out as small experiments on the side
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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 1:17
So the question I had was, why did you have to do an all or nothing? Was there no option to kind of leave a few resources working on what was already happening as backup, and then perhaps like taking the majority of the force and then focusing on the new payment platform? Yeah. So that was the question is, was the new pivot that convincing that you are ready to drop the bird in hand? Go for the bigger thing
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@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 3:37
I think those pivots are always opportunities in the making. And as a CEO as an entrepreneur, I've always found that we need to always have room to create such small experiments on the site and have enough belief and faith in those to let them take their own course. But of course, having also the resolve to shut them down if we don't see them pan out
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@Vikas
Vikas Gupta
@Vikas · 2:09
Hi Shami to your question, did we have the option or why we chose to completely stop investing in our existing business and move to the new direction? I think for us the reason was that we 100% believed that the new direction was a much more interesting opportunity for us, and it created a way for us to build a much more meaningful outcome for the company than continue to invest in the existing business would be
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@Subir666
Subir Agrawal
@Subir666 · 1:24

Pivot is natural

You need to have finance from people who understand that if you are buying their funding because they're believe in the original idea and not in you, maybe they are not the best of the financial partners, all the best medical
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@lyfe
Syed Arij
@lyfe · 3:56

Fail Cheap, Pivot Fast!

In a startup, you have a few people where the decision making rests on versus a large organization. You really have to go through the hopes of getting a nod, so to speak, from multiple teams, sometimes even 20, 25, 25 different teams I have seen in my experience, and that is just hard. It is time consuming, and it requires a lot of effort to go through
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@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 4:29

#pivotfail #myopicdecisions

But it just always kind of stuck with me that even if you have the best of ideas, and I think that was a complete, no brainer, complete way of pivoting that business into something that would have been even more fruitful. It just didn't happen. And there was nothing I could do to convince them that that was the right move. And I think it speaks to your point about is the organization ready to pivot the larger organization?
@Howie
Howie Rubin
@Howie · 2:11
We got to make money. So to me, product development and maybe entrepreneurship is all about the willingness to take the seed of an idea, the willingness of top management to become good listeners and learners. The willingness of top management to let those people involved with the product have a share in the product and the product development. Allow them to voice their opinions and allow the product to evolve as people are participating in the development of the product
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