- Startup Archive
- Posts
- Instagram founder Kevin Systrom: “most successful things are pivots”
Instagram founder Kevin Systrom: “most successful things are pivots”
In the clip below, Tim Ferriss asks Kevin Systrom—who famously pivoted a failed check-in app into Instagram—how do you know when it’s the right time to stop?
“In some aspects, there’s a fetishizing of perseverance… And yet, if you look at a lot of the largest public successes, many of them had some type of pivot or shutting down of something that wasn’t working.”
Kevin posits that most successful companies are pivots. He points out that YouTube started out as a dating site. And there are plenty of other examples:
Slack started out as a gaming company called Tiny Speck
Twitter started out as a podcasting app called Odeo
Twitch started out as JustinTV, oblivious to gaming streamers
The Discord founding team's first product was Fates Forever, a MOBA game on mobile platforms that failed.
Kevin suggests that most first products fail because it's really hard to tell what's going to work before you put it in people's hands.
"The key to entrepreneurship is failing really quickly: putting it out there, seeing if it works. If it doesn't, diagnosing why. And then focusing on how to improve it from there... Most of the time you get it wrong. So the question is: knowing you're going to get it wrong, how equipped are you to deal with that failure really quickly before you run out of money?"
He continues:
"The entrepreneurs that I've seen do really well are the ones that are equipped and engaged on the change from something that's not working to something that is. Far too many people--because of ego or whatever--stick with ideas for far too long, and it ends up going really poorly."