The Startup by Jesko von Windheim

Author:Jesko von Windheim
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030450786
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

J. von WindheimThe Startuphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45078-6_12

Pivot

Jesko von Windheim1

(1)Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Jesko von Windheim

Email: [email protected]

The term “pivot” has a special meaning for the startup community. We don’t say: “We failed and now we are desperately trying to do something else.” We say: “We pivoted.”

This use was probably coined by some Silicon Valley guru entrepreneur who was raising a new round of funding and knew very well that his venture capital buddies needed to hear something better than failure and desperation. Communication is everything in life. In contrast to the terminal, ugly nature of the word failure, the word pivot conjures grace and intent. It’s like a ballerina performing a perfect pirouette after decades of training. Startups pivot all the time. It’s pretty much expected: “Yeah, we were building a flying car, but we’ve pivoted to an app that counts calories in ten languages.”

Doesn’t that sound impressive? It implies so much. The flying car sounded pretty cool, but pivoting to the app suggests that this new direction is even better! It also gives the impression that the change in direction was brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed. Yes, if nothing else, good entrepreneurs are masters at selling a grand vision for the future, and the simple word pivot is part of that sell.

Well, we pivoted with MEMS, but it was neither brilliantly conceived, nor flawlessly executed. Our pivot into photonics was thrust upon us by a market that screamed for a solution that we held in our hands but could not comprehend. You see, it’s one thing to see a need; it’s quite another to understand it and respond effectively. Fortunately for us, we were dragged into photonics by some very insistent customers who forced us to wake up. We did so in the nick of time.

Our pivot highlighted how great technology teams can be directionally right and specifically wrong. The MCNC software engineer who first taught me about e-commerce in the network services group was probably the best example of this phenomenon that I have ever encountered. But our MEMS team was not far behind. Early on, when we first sat down to discuss potential applications of MEMS technology, the engineering team correctly identified telecommunications as the area with the greatest potential for MEMS commercialization. Within telecommunications they identified optical communications (which they referred to it as “electro-optics”) and electrical communications (which included wired and wireless applications). It was between these two that we veered very slightly off path.

“Electro-optics is a tiny market with esoteric applications,” the team assured me. “It’s not worth going after. MEMS need high volumes to be cost effective and electrical communications are huge, especially wireless communications. That’s going to take over the world.”

They were correct on every count, except for their assessment of the electro-optics opportunity. Electro-optics was not even the correct term for it: We were talking about optical communications and its underlying technology more commonly referred to as photonics. Not that we knew the terminology. Our

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