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I'm not sure I get it? I'm not opposed to pivots; I actually think people probably need to do them more often, not less. The thing I am opposed to is the slow half pivot, that are more renovations than pivots.

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May 1, 2023Liked by Benn Stancil

don't blame the player, blame the game.

But the analysis has a selection bias. For one, Looker did not start as a BI tool. By Seed Round, it did not even have dashboards.

And some companies started as something else entirely: Outreach.io (workforce management tool), Slack (Game company), etc.

While in hindsight everything is very clear, when you're in it, the markets look small (Fivetran & ETL, Slack & Chat, Salesforce & CRM), categories are not as clear cut, and the past is a poor predictor of the future.

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author

Yeah, my point was that pivots can work, but they've got to be big pivots. What I don't htink works is the slow or partial pivot. And as the footnote says, there is selection bias, but in this case, that's the point - if a company dies and we don't hear it's story, don't do what it did?

I agree about markets looking small not being bad though. I had a point that I left out that I think chasing a big TAM is actually a mistake, because it easy to kind of wander through adjacent ideas, rather than focus on a narrow thing.

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May 2, 2023Liked by Benn Stancil

gotchya. I read b/w the lines and missed those fine points. So we're in agreement 🤝

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Netflix?

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