Q: How often do pivots work? Instagram founder Kevin Systrom famously pivoted from his mobile check-in app Burbn to build one of the most successful social networking products of all time. In this clip, he 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. He argues: "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." So to answer your question specifically: pivots don't always work, but many of the most successful companies are pivots. If you've pivoted your startup, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's more likely to fail. If you've done it right, you've hopefully pivoted toward an idea that has a higher probability of success by leveraging what you learned from your failures.