You Don’t Have to Pivot in a Crisis

You Don’t Have to Pivot in a Crisis

Daniel Isenberg and Alessandro Di Fiore | Harvard Business Review

When Covid-19 burst upon the scene in early 2020, startup ventures faced dramatic shifts in markets and the importance of strategic agility became axiomatic: If you wanted your venture to survive, let alone thrive, pundits (including ourselves) almost universally advocated deep internal cuts accompanied by pivots to new markets and business models. As the leadership of the tech-focused California VC firm Sequoia Capital wrote in a March Medium post identifying Covid-19 as the black swan of 2020, “Nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances.”

However, ventures we know well through our investment portfolio (Isenberg is a minor (<1%) shareholder in Guesty, X24 Factory, and Camp) and network — many well-funded startups in hard hit industries such as hospitality, travel, and furniture — shunned strategic agility (changing product-market fit) for stability and resolutely stayed the course with only minor tweaks.

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You Don’t Have to Pivot in a Crisis, Daniel Isenberg and Alessandro Di Fiore, Harvard Business Review, 2020