Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret is that the startup boom is mostly a disguised jobs fair that directly benefits the big corporations. Occasionally, an innovative startup makes it past this stage but it has to be so bad that no one wants it — not even for its team. It’s from among those ugly ducklings that the swans of the new age emerge: FB, Goog, Twitter, Yahoo! and others — no one wanted them at first, then they couldn’t get enough of them.
Form Letter Template For Acquired Startups
By panicsteve via Github
Dear soon-to-be-former user,
We’ve got some fantastic news! Well, it’s great news for us anyway. You, on
the other hand, are fucked.
We’ve just been acquired by:
[ ] Other: _________________
As you are aware, we’ve always provided a free service, and have never even
tried offering a for-pay option. This means we’ve never had any income and
have been operating at a loss for our entire existence. Since any schoolchild
can see this is unsustainable, it should have been more-or-less obvious to you
from the get-go that we were either going to crap up the site with ads at a
few cents per-click, or that we’ve always intended to be an acquisition target.
You can do the math on that one.
Your personal data which, until just now, was critical to our core business
will be deleted:
[ ] Immediately
[ ] Within a week
[ ] Within 30 days
We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with
solutions at our new home. Please realize that this is so vague a statement
as to be completely meaningless. But we just made so much money that at the
moment we genuinely believe this horseshit. In reality, you will never hear
about us or anything we create ever again. We are probably going to end up,
like, implementing a new scrollbar for Google Reader or something.
Thanks so much for making our business so valuable and enticing to a much
larger company with more money than sense.
Now grab your data while you still can and get out of here,
Shiny happy Shit.ly management ninjas
Connecting people with solutions
“Shit.ly loves you!”
To pivot is, essentially, to fail gracefully. While the term has been in the start-up lexicon for decades, it is coming up more often in the current Internet boom, as entrepreneurs find that many investors are willing to keep the money flowing even if a start-up takes a hard left turn.
“Ideas are like lightning in a bottle, so if the company is small enough and didn’t seem to capture lightning on their first try, it makes sense to try again,” said Ben Horowitz, one of the founders of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “The art of the pivot is to do it fast and early. The older and bigger the business, the harder it is to change directions.”
Mr. Horowitz speaks from experience: A decade ago, he went through a pivot of Loudcloud, a publicly traded enterprise services firm that he founded with Marc Andreessen, into Opsware, a networking software company. “That was very public and very scary,” he said. “We dropped down to 35 cents on the Nasdaq, and although we went back up to $14, it took awhile. When you’re a small company, no one really notices if you make a big change.”
- Jenna Wortham, For Some Internet Start-Ups, a Failure Is Just the Beginning - NYTimes.com
The use of the term ‘pivot’ in startupland is the corollary to the now commonplace notion that you may have to fail in order to learn a life lesson. While this has become conventional wisdom, startup founders are reluctant to admit their baby is ugly, or that massive success is not going to come with the next release. The adoption of pivoting is a great metaphorical headshift, and it’s one great example of ambient innovation: the startup scene has adopted, applied, and spread the concept of pivoting, and that has had major impacts on founders willingness to junk weak ideas.
(via underpaidgenius)
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
