Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 56Pivot

Rob Hayes

Rob is a partner at First Round Capital and has been a Techstars mentor since 2008.

The one thing that the hundreds of founders I meet each year have in common is that their plan is wrong. Sometimes it’s the big things, sometimes it’s the little things, but the plan is always wrong. Founders who can pivot to a new idea given what they learn will survive their plan being wrong, whereas those who believe that all signs pointing to trouble are wrong are not going to survive.

My favorite example of a great pivot is from a company originally called Riya. This company had developed leading-edge facial recognition technology at the same time that tagged photo sites like Flickr were becoming dominant. With Riya, you could point to someone’s face in several pictures and tell the service who that person was. Riya would then find all instances of that person in all your photos and tag them with the appropriate person’s name.

It turns out that the service worked fine, but there was not as much user uptake as the company wanted. It was unclear whether there was a large, thriving business that could be built around this technology.

That did not deter the founder, Munjal Shah. He pivoted quickly and repurposed the technology toward a concept called “visual shopping” and rebranded the company as Like.com. It turns out that while hard goods like consumer electronics generally have enough metadata around them to easily index for search (model numbers, brand names), ...