Transcript

So one of the real tough questions for any entrepreneur is when do I pivot, when do I proceed or when do I just do a restart. So what you’re trying to understand at this pivot or proceed part is, is did we find number one, product market fit. That is, are we talking about value propositions, products, service that actually matches a set of customer needs. And then do we understand the archetype of those customers in detail. And does our MVP, our minimal viable product, match those needs of those archetypes. The other thing that might happen in this process is you take an honest look at what you’ve been doing so far and go, you know, we’ve tried pivoting, we’ve tried different customers, segments, this idea just isn’t working.

We used to think that startups simply execute per plan and the biggest problem you were going to have as an entrepreneur is to make sure you got a space big enough to put the bags of money when they arrive at the door. The reality is that most startups actually fail. Most of your hypotheses are going to be wrong. And you need a mindset of learning from each iteration and from each change and from each pivot.

The best example of this in the last couple years was a company called Odeo. They had tried a ton of moves and it just wasn’t working. And one of the founders said well look, let’s give the money back to our investors. And the investors had so much faith in this entrepreneur he said, why don’t you keep the money and try some other ideas. And he said we have this crazy idea about 140 characters and making that into a communications business. Turned out it was Twitter. Twitter was a complete restart, not just a pivot. But they threw out everything, but kept the same team, same building and whatever, but just started from scratch. At some point in time you might want to decide that that is the right thing to do; so either proceed, pivot or restart.