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Wayfair: Your Online Mega-Pivot Megastore
When you head a startup, you can pivot until you get where you need to go, but when you run a successful company you have a lot more to lose. Actually, the difference between nursing a startup and...
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Media6Degrees Knows What You Want To Buy Even Before You Do
The data-wonk founders of Media6Degrees (M6D) founded the company in 2008 on a simple premise: that by tapping the social graph of MySpace, they could parse custom digital audiences, or "tribes," for...
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The Steve Jobs Pivot
Over the course of Fast Company's Pivot series I've covered ad firms, media startups, retailers, search engines, dating sites and even musicians that have been forced to either change direction or face...
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Amazon's Pivot
When Amazon.com anointed itself "the world's biggest bookstore," with 1 million titles as it launched in 1995, Jeff Bezos, the company's now-iconic founder, was already thinking about other markets to...
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Facebook's Social Pivot
For all his real-life social awkwardness, Mark Zuckerberg has been enamored with the intersection of software and social connections stretching back at least to his freshmen year at Harvard. One early...
View ArticleGroupon And Its Pivots: A Mega, Meta Mash-Up Of The News
Groupon is my personal favorite poster child for the shortest cycle time of rise and fall ever. [Its] long journey from flailing startup to multi-billion-dollar Wall Street obsession has played out...
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Love Is Covering A Shift For A Hungover Buddy: The BetterShift Pivot
All you need is love? Bah, the Beatles were full of it. You need to monetize that love. Jokes about prostitution aside, that's the lesson serial entrepreneur Chris Lyman learned the hard way. With...
View ArticleHow Trip Adler Found His Idea For Scribd After Hanging Up On 1-800-ASKTRIP
The official history for Scribd, a social publishing company, goes something like this: When Scribd's baby-faced CEO Trip Adler was a student at Harvard, he wondered why there was no simple mechanism...
View ArticleAn Insider's History Of How A Podcasting Startup Pivoted To Become Twitter
Making sense of Twitter's history is a bit like trying to follow a discussion on Twitter: It depends on who you listen to.What everyone agrees on is that it started out in 2005 as Odeo, a podcasting...
View ArticleReid Hoffman On PayPal's Pivoted Path To Success
PayPal pivoted not once, not twice, but at least five times before finding the innovative business model that led to its success.Today, PayPal is a global online money changer. But its original...
View ArticleHow Chegg Found A Textbook Rental Goldmine In A College Classifieds Haystack
Chegg rents a million textbooks a year and employs 150 people. But it was originally Cheggpost.com, a service providing free classified ads to college students. Choosing among categories like...
View ArticleBilly Chasen's $2 Million Pivot From QR Codes To Turntable.fm
Everybody deserves a second chance, right? And that is the theme of the 2nd installment in our pivot series. Billy Chasen and his cofounder Seth Goldstein had an intriguing idea: To create an app that...
View ArticleHipmunk Took The Agony Out Of Flying Then Pivoted To Hotel Booking
To take the "suckage" out of planning trips Adam Goldstein and Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman created Hipmunk, a combination airline ticket search service and aggregator. Instead of the staid old...
View ArticleGojee's Mike Lavalle On The Key Insight That Turned The Site Into Foodie...
A couple of overworked Morgan Stanley bankers read a story about Intuit acquiring Mint.com, the personal finance tool, for a cool $170 million and had an idea: What if they applied the Mint model to...
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James Hong's Pivot From Rating To Dating: The HotOrNot Story
Two Heinekens into a lazy afternoon in October 2000, James Hong, a 27-year-old dotcom refugee from Mountain View, CA, was listening to his roommate, Jim Young, a Berkeley graduate student in electrical...
View ArticleHow Eric Ries Coined "The Pivot" And What Your Business Can Learn From It
It's only appropriate that Eric Ries is the subject of the first video for Fast Company's new series: The Pivot. He's the author of a best-selling book, The Lean Startup, and the man who made the term...
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How Making A Movie Is Like Launching A Startup
It was a frigid November afternoon.We were shooting a movie inside and in front of a beverage distribution warehouse in the still-semi-gritty Gowanus section of Brooklyn, when a beefy pickup truck...
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Have A Great Script? Cool, Now Good Luck Getting Your Movie Made
In the 1950s, couch potatoes surely fantasized about a magical device that would allow them to change channels without having to roll off the sofa and trundle to the television. But it took Zenith...
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We Had A Script, A Director, And $200,000 In The Bank. What Could Go Wrong?
Now that we had our script, a director, and $200,000 in investors' money in the bank, we were ready to start filming. What our team lacked, however, was someone who actually knew how to make a movie....
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Why Making Movies Is Not For The Faint Of Heart
It was a pivotal scene. We were on the roof of a former factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn, braving the New York nighttime December chill. The set was awash in light, thanks to a phalanx of equipment, and...
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