Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. I'm here with Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal,

CEO of Lightro, and we're sharing some founder war stories today, focusing on the theme of pivots,

especially since pivot is one of those overused and now seemingly innocuous words that has lost

a lot of meaning for a lot of people. Both of you have witnessed firsthand or driven major shifts in

company direction. And so in this episode, we're going to cover what it means for decision making,

culture, product market fit, timing when you don't have that much cash left, and to how every

startup is actually a series of pivots. I used to think that there were two kinds of startups, right? There were

ones where your idea worked from the get-go, and from then on out it was just up into the right

and champagne and caviar, and then there were the hard ones that didn't work out, and maybe you

figured it out along the way and got lucky. And I think my worldview has evolved a lot where I think that really

actually every startup is a pivot and it's along this big spectrum from tiny pivots that

happened at the beginning to much harder, bigger ones. If we take most, if not all of the biggest,

most successful tech companies that we think about today, just about every single one of

them went through a bigger little pivot at some point in their history, right?

You know, things like Google starting as an enterprise search company and becoming the largest

advertising company in the world.

That was a form of a pivot in general in tech.

In hindsight, everything looks great. But when you're in the heat

of the moment, there's always some level of uncertainty or pivot or hardship that you have to go

through. Intel used to be in the memory business. Pivoted to microprocessors. That was the legendary

pivot that built the PC industry. When I think of building startups, I think of the sort of Jobsian narrative of

like you have this vision and a product and you have this incredible view of the future and you're

...