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Balaji Srinivasan: “If you have runway, you’re not dead. You iterate until you survive.”

In the clip below, Balaji is asked for his thoughts on pivots, and he lists several examples of massive companies that pivoted from their initial idea:

  • YouTube started as a dating site

  • PayPal was originally built for beaming money between PalmPilots

  • Slack started as a gaming company called Tiny Speck

  • Opsware (sold for $1.6B) started as LoudCloud

He continues:

“Even Google initially thought it was going to make its money from enterprise search and that was a non-starter. Overture came up with the concept of auctioning ads and Google basically just copied them and executed it better.”

Balaji tells the audience:

“Basically you iterate until you achieve product/market fit, and then you accelerate… If you have the runway, you’re not dead. You iterate until you survive and thrive. And then you become big.”