For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness. It’s tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you’re doing. I find this particularly odd. I think a person who can’t change his point of view is dangerous. Steve Jobs often changed his views depending on the situation, and I don’t know anybody who thought he was weak,” writes Ed Catmell in his book “Corporation of Geniuses. How to Manage a Team of Creative People.
Craigslist
Craigslist (the American equivalent of Avito) is immortal. Even though it cannot be listed among the top tech companies, it is still worth saying a few words about the platform, which has enjoyed great success in the American market for 20 years. But where and when did it all begin? In the early 1990s, Craig Newmark, an IBM employee who had just moved to San Francisco, compiled a list of email addresses for local events. Craig thought the list would help him meet new people. The idea was picked up, and the list became popular. People started using it for more than just meetings. In the future, it inspired Craig, and he quit his job and started developing Craigslist. Today the company is worth $1 billion.
Almost everyone has it now. Twitter used to be a small side-project of Odeo. Initially it was used as an SMS service for a small group of employees. The press and investors did not find the project interesting at the time, despite the support of CEO Evan Williams. Here’s what TechCrunch wrote about it a decade ago :
“What is this company doing to make their offering attractive? How do their shareholders feel about side-projects like Twitter when their main product is a complete bore? Only the design is good.”
At the time, they couldn’t imagine that the founders of Odeo had built a new business that would change the way we communicate on the Internet.
Unsplash
What do you do with the rest of your photos after a photo shoot for a branding session? You create a repository for royalty-free photos, of course. When the Canadian startup Crew hired a professional photographer to take the photos, there were more photos than needed. But instead of letting the photos get lost on a hard drive somewhere, the staff put them on the site and gave them away for free. Next thing you know, one post on HackerNews went viral, and the photos were downloaded more than 50,000 times. Today, Unsplash has tens of thousands of great photos available for free download. Unsplash has become the place to go for free pictures.
Oculus
There are many stories of how famous companies started in garages: Apple, Google, Amazon, HP. And Oculus. After a long day at the University of California’s Mixed Reality Laboratory (MXR), founder Palmer Lackey was on his way to the garage to try to build the future of virtual reality. After one of his most successful Kickstarter campaigns, Lackey quit his job, dropped out, and sold Oculus to Facebook for $2.4 billion, $400 million in real money, $2 billion in Facebook stock (before they even had a product out).
Houzz
If you’re looking for something related to home remodeling or decorating, you’ll probably come across a listing on Houzz. The community serves more than 40 million users a month and has about 1,000 employees worldwide. However, they started out very humble. One day, the founders, the Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen family, were faced with a lack of home improvement resources while renovating. This prompted them to create their own. Their first users were twenty parents from the school where Adi and Alon’s children went, several architects and designers. Today, however, the company is worth $4 billion.
Khan Academy
While teaching his relatives, Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy educational platform, received a slightly ambiguous compliment: His students suggested that he meet online rather than in person. Khan didn’t ignore the remark; it just stuck in his head. So he started making ten-minute YouTube videos on subjects ranging from biology to art. At the same time, he was working as a hedge fund analyst. When the Youtube activity started to gain momentum, Khan quit his job and now has more than 100 employees under his management.
WeWork
One of the most important startups in the world might not have come along at all. Before WeWork was founded, Adam Newman was selling children’s clothes with patches on their knees in a small building in Brooklyn. According to Newman himself, at the time he was “misguided and channeling his energy in the wrong direction.”
As additional income, Newman and his partner rented space in the same building for little money and opened a “green” co-working space. With the proceeds from the sale of their stake in Green Desk (the original co-working company), they started a new co-working space.