There is no pivot
Do not try and pivot. There is no pivot. There is only spinning.
Here is what “pivot” means:
While sitting around in a conference room with a couple coworkers, you have an idea for a startup. “Man,” you say about some internal tool you built at your company, “Nighthawk / Stuffie / Vulcan / Hacky Sack / Shake ‘n Bake is really good. What if we made a business out of it?”
Or, while reading about some other huge startup—Uber, Stripe, whatever—you come up with some way to apply their solution to another problem. “Man,” you say while looking at how big the company is, “What if there was Uber for drugs? Or eBay for drugs? Or Stripe for drugs? Or iPhone for drugs?”
You research it. You talk to potential customers. You pitch it to investors. You convince a few of them that it is a good idea, and they give you money, to use technology to sell drugs.1
You hire engineers and designers, and spend months—years?—building a delightful product. You hire marketers, and spend months—years?—carefully crafting a striking brand. You recruit “design partners;” you cultivate a “community.” You launch your product with great panache.
At some point months—years?—later, you eventually realize that your idea was, in fact, not a good idea. Despite your comprehensive research and delightful product and striking brand and great panache, nobody is using your app.
This is a problem! You spent a bunch of money building something nobody wanted! You hired a bunch of experts to solve a problem that didn’t need to be solved! You filled your phone with drug dealers, and you are not doing any drug deals.
And so, you do it—compassionately, in front of the entire company, and later, resolutely, on LinkedIn: We must Pivot. You say you still care deeply about your original mission, but the timing is off. The product was too early; the market was not ready. You are grateful for your passionate customers—their support has meant everything—but the landscape has shifted, and we must evolve too. We cannot be afraid of hard choices. Today is a tough day, but it is the beginning of a new chapter. In building our app, we have built several exciting technologies. We have made many useful community connections. We have been researching a new idea; we have been talking to potential customers; we are sure that this one is a good idea. We have made this decision deliberately, and now we will do it forcefully. Gradually and then suddenly. We are excited for what’s next.
There are a lot of implicit assumptions loaded into The Pivot: That companies should have a clear direction; that they can change direction, but the decision is heavy; that when they do decide to pivot, they must do so definitively. And, of course, that it probably won’t work. Because great companies have clear directions; great companies do not spin in circles. “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,” says Harvard; the essence of execution, this blog once suggested, is steadfastly doing it:
Making the decision is more important than the decision you make. The success of a startup—or of a strategic decision in an established company, or even, to go all Chicken Soup for the Soul for a moment,2 of decisions in life and love—doesn’t depend on the specific choice. It depends on how committed you are to that choice. Often, we don’t fail because we choose the wrong thing; we fail because we refuse to choose anything at all.
Pivots represent neither of these things. They represent experimentation, doubt, and indecision. They are Silicon Valley’s equivalent of a fighting couple “taking a break”—often, the gentle beginning of an inevitable end. What comes after a pivot is usually a long, fitful march downhill. Nobody congratulations anyone on their upcoming pivot.
Four days ago, a friend told me they were in a perma-pivot. Everyone is right now, they said. Everything is moving too fast, and everyone is building on quicksand. Your market seems great today; it’s been mowed down by Anthropic’s howitzer tomorrow. You’re constantly looking for your footing. You never know what direction you’re heading.
Whatever you do, they said, don’t get caught in that dizzying whirlpool.
—
Two days ago, another friend recently told me that they run an ice cream shop that launches a speculative new flavor every Wednesday. It’s a whole event—come to the shop, try the flavor, for one time only. Some flavors are popular enough to repeat, but most are meant to be made, to be enjoyed, and to be gone. “So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
You should come, they said, and best to come on a Wednesday.
You could ask two questions about all of this, I suppose. First, are pivots outdated? Nobody would accuse an ice cream shop of pivoting. Launching a new flavor every week is something between a constant experiment and a marketing campaign. The weekly “pivot” isn’t a change in direction; it’s the entire strategy.
If it takes as much time to prototype software as it does to develop an ice cream flavor, could startups be doing the same thing? Should they be doing the same thing? When software was slow to build, commitment to a direction was important, and pivoting was expensive. When software is cheap to build—and when you have to go faster to keep up with everyone else—do the rules invert? Commitment becomes expensive, and pivoting is what’s important.
We’ve talked about this before, and the downfall of the fundamentals:
[It may be that] Apple—and [Ben] Thompson, and me, and probably many of you—have an outdated understanding of how the world works. It may be that nobody was talking about Apple’s big launch event because Apple isn’t doing interesting things with AI, but it also may be because big launch events have no cultural traction. They, like us, are part of a shrinking conversational artery. Apple’s playbook is stale; its vocabulary is stale; its entire economic model of demand generation is stale. Apple’s launch events are losing their grip over Silicon Valley because everything has to be a meme or a controversy now, and polite launch events don’t produce memes or controversy.
What it means to build software has changed dramatically; why would what it means to build a software business not change just as much?
Which raises the second question: Are we outdated?3 That prior post continued:
It is easy to see when other people are the unc. They are from an earlier generation; a different time. For a while, when you’re living in the main channel, the world confirms your instincts: Their weird anachronisms are disappearing, and your vocabulary is ascendant.
But then we get stuck. And it is much harder to let go of our own sense of cosmology—because our beliefs don’t feel like fads, but fundamentals. … The old generations believed in discredited science; our beliefs are settled science; the new generations are chasing pseudoscience.
My friend said they were in a perma-pivot, because what other word would they use? But maybe that’s the problem. Calling it a pivot loads it up with other implications—that it’s temporary; that it’s bad; that the job of a startup founder is to find a firm direction for their company—and maybe those implications are no longer true. Maybe their situation isn’t bad; it’s just what a software company is now: A test kitchen, launching new flavors every week, where the short shelf-life is the point.
Everyone is looking for a durable place to plant a flag. What product has a moat? What market is safe? Companies are exploring, with the goal of finding a place to settle down, and make a home.
But there’s no promise technology companies will always work like that. Maybe we’re more like ice cream shops, or musicians—only as good as our latest album. Constantly evolve, or drop dead. Maybe we do not need a direction; we need to just keep moving. Maybe we cannot hide from Anthropic and OpenAI; we can only keep running from them. Maybe we aren’t pivoting; we’re just playing Pac-Man.
Don’t lose faith. You’ve got a great name, you’ve got a great team,4 you’ve got a great logo, and you’ve got a great name. Now you just need an idea—over and over and over again.
Maybe there is a pivot
What is a celebrity?
For a long time, I would’ve said that a celebrity is someone who accomplished some profound professional success, and got famous because of it. They played for the Lakers; they made a blockbuster; they made some good songs; they won an election. Though their fame might extend beyond the initial thing that made them popular, their profession was always their anchor. They were an athlete, an actor, a musician, a politician. And it was a bizarre novelty when they escaped one world and appeared in another, like when a TV star ran for president.
Now, ah, you know. Celebrity is a much looser concept. Celebrities are influencers: They are a portable endorsement that can be attached to whatever art project they are working on, office they’re running for, or drugs they’re selling. Famous people aren’t athletes or actors or musicians or politicians. They’re brands.
Anyway, this wasn’t quite what I had in mind two weeks ago, but, uh, sure?
After agreeing to sell all its assets last month for less than 1 percent of its previous $4 billion valuation, the shoe company Allbirds announced on Wednesday that it would “pivot its business” to artificial intelligence. …
In a statement, the company, which is based in San Francisco, said that an unnamed investor5 had agreed to spend $50 million to finance a shift to A.I. infrastructure. That money, the company said, will be used to buy graphics processing units, known as GPUs, powerful chips that can run calculations and analyze enormous amounts of data.
On one hand, lol, what:
“At first it read like a really well-executed April Fools’ joke,” Mr. Kleyman said of the Allbirds announcement. But, he added, “given the craziness of this industry right now, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.”
On the other hand, it has worked before!
$24 million iced tea company says it’s pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200%
And it can work again!
Allbirds soars 582% after sneaker firm rebrands as AI stock.
That is the general take on the situation: This is either a ridiculous Hail Mary or a cynical stunt, and either way, it’s dumb. But, everyone is crazy and everything is a meme, so, ok, maybe the best way to make some money with a niche brand that has some loose nostalgic value is by using it to make a joke.
Or—consider how Matt Levine described the joke:
I feel like, if you ran a big technology company, and you were looking to expand your artificial intelligence capabilities and needed to rent access to graphics processing units, and a GPU-as-a-service/AI-cloud company came to pitch you, and you said “so tell me a little bit about your company,” and the company said “well two weeks ago we were a sneaker company but we have since pivoted to AI,” you might say “huh, thanks but no thanks, we’re going to go with someone with a bit more AI experience and, you know, an actual data center.” Maybe that’s wrong; maybe the sneaker guys are great at AI. But you might worry.
But! If you said “so tell me a little bit about your company,” and the company said “well two weeks ago we were a sneaker company called Allbirds, but we have pivoted to AI,” your reaction might be different. Because, in this hypothetical, you run a big technology company, and you probably spent years wearing Allbirds. “I used to love Allbirds,” you might say; “high five!” And then you might sign a long-term cloud hosting agreement with Former Allbirds, because like many tech executives you have a nostalgic fondness for their brand.
Replace “Allbirds” with “Tom Brady” or “Timothée Chalamet” or “Alix Earle” and it’s not that weird! Replace “Allbirds” with “Steph Curry” and it’s practically true! Because that’s how celebrities work today: We feverishly buy whatever Alix Earle is selling us, not because we love the product, but because we love Alix Earle. Alix Earle doesn’t pivot; Alix Earle simply points her howitzer at her next market.
So, maybe Allbirds is meme-finance taken to its grim conclusion—or maybe it’s the next evolution of the firm. Before, companies were means of production that made and sold catalogs of related stuff. Now, they’re influencers. They’re an aesthetic, a portable logo that can be tacked on to whatever product or service that some particular type of customer is into at the moment. Allbirds launches a data center. Allbirds launches an incubator. Allbirds launches an agentic personal CRM for founders. Get ready for Coachella with Allbirds. If people can become brands, maybe brands can become brands.
Don’t lose faith in Allbirds. They’ve got a great name, they’ve got a great team, they’ve got a great logo, and they’ve got a great name. Now they just need an idea.
There were also many startups that were “[big startup X] for [different thing Y]” where Y was not “drugs.” But the drug ones do seem to be better businesses.
In the original quote, there was a footnote here talking about Chicken Soup for the Soul’s public parent company, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. There was a link to its stock ticker, but that link is now broken, because, since then, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment filed for bankruptcy and is being liquidated.
Bummer, but, oh man, do I have an idea.
Do you know what’s trending? Do you know what’s cringe? What’s chopped? Do you know how tall LaMelo Ball is? Do you know how tall LaMelo Ball is?!?? (Though really, do you know how tall Coby White is?!!?)
There is also the more uncomfortable question: Are we a great team? Are we still cut out for this? If you are of a certain age, you’re used to ideas taking a long time to build. You’re used to needing to make hard choices, and then committing to them. You’re used to going to Blockbuster to rent one two-hour movie. Pick well, because it’s expensive to get it wrong.
Now, we have Netflix and TikTok. Everything is a click away, and thirty seconds long. We can manifest our ideas in a weekend.
Can we survive in that world? When we’re used to choices being expensive and irreversible and now anything is immediately possible, do some of us become paralyzed by indecision and analysis paralysis? Do others suffer from the opposite disease, and get addicted to the constant sense of possibility that is just one weekend binge away?
When you’re born in the darkness, the light might be nothing but blinding.
Could it be? Is it she? (I mean, no, probably not, but, there is this!)
On Apple...I don't think it's that Apple is outdated, per se. Well, it kind of is - but not because of the culture shift. Apple had a secret weapon, and that secret weapon died. Jobs, for all his faults, was a product visionary - and lacking that, they have been spinning their wheels ever since.
And really, I would argue that's true in most all of tech. What new idea have they had since the iPhone, since 'We can do this thing now that everyone has a computer in their pocket?'; the wave of companies unleashed by the smartphone were just mining the possibility space that the smartphone unleashed.
The world is spinning faster, but I don't think that's a good thing - that speed isn't creating anything that makes people happier, that makes life richer, that makes it easier to hold on. All the speed is doing that we can see is breaking things, leaving people more precarious, breaking people.
I believe in adapting as much as possible - but part of that is seeing a value in that thing to adapt to. I look for the value in AI, in influencers, and all I see is poison and cancer.
Sometimes, the right choice is to fight the tide, because if you don't you drown. I think we're in that moment now.
Only speed used to be the ultimate advantage — “天下武功，惟快不破.” In the AI era, speed is table stakes because models move faster than any team. The real edge now is where and why you move: taste, judgment, and the courage to keep spinning in the right direction while everyone else either freezes or blindly chases the next meme.