The 'Going Home' Pivot
A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
A strong pivot doesn't jump to a random new idea; it moves 'warmer,' closer to something the founders are already expert at, and builds on unique insights gained from grinding on the prior idea. Founders often consciously avoid the very idea they know best because they feel burnt out on it — the job is to get over that barrier.
Origin
Dalton Caldwell's 'good pivot is like going home' framing, illustrated with Brex, Retool, PostHog, Segment, and Zip pivots he oversaw at YC.
Core principles
- 01A successful pivot gets warmer, not colder, relative to your expertise
- 02The best new idea usually builds on unique insight you could only have gained by running the prior idea
- 03You often can't conceive of the winning idea before you start — it emerges as a side effect of earlier attempts
- 04Sometimes founders must consciously overcome a barrier against working on the thing they know best because they're burnt out on it
How to run it
- 1
Inventory what you now know deeply
List the domains, tools, and customer problems you became a genuine expert on while running your current idea — including internal tools you built and markets you learned.
Pro tip The dashboards and internal tooling you built just to operate your failing startup can be the actual product (this is literally how Retool started).
- 2
Move toward the warmer idea
Choose the pivot that is closest to your existing expertise and prior-startup insight, not the flashiest or most novel-sounding one.
Pro tip Ask 'what do I already know all about?' — the Brex founders knew fintech from Brazil, not the optics needed for their original VR headset.
Watch out Don't pivot into a domain you know nothing about just because it seems high-tech or exciting.
- 3
Push past your burnout barrier
If you're avoiding the obvious warm idea because you're sick of that domain, recognize that resistance and deliberately get over it.
Watch out Consciously filtering out 'I don't want to work on this because I'm burnt out on it' can cause you to skip your best idea.
In the wild
In Caldwell's Winter 2017 group, a VR-headset startup (Vyond) and a UK Venmo clone (Cashew) looked like the two worst companies — despondent founders, no growth. Vyond pivoted back to fintech (the founders had worked on a Brazilian fintech company) and became Brex; Cashew's founders pivoted into the internal dashboards they'd built to run their app and became Retool.
→ The two objectively worst-looking companies in the group became by far the most successful — Brex a decacorn.
Segment started as classroom software to tell a professor you were confused, then a Mixpanel competitor no one adopted. Grinding for years made them experts in analytics, leading them to a JavaScript library that sends events to multiple endpoints.
→ They could never have invented the final idea up front — it was a side effect of earlier ideas.
Common mistakes
Pivoting colder
Jumping to a domain you know nothing about (like programmers building a VR headset with no optics knowledge) makes the pivot harder, not easier.
Skipping the idea you know best
Burnout can make founders unconsciously rule out the warm, expertise-adjacent idea that is actually their strongest move.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders whose current idea is stalling and who are deciding what to pivot into
Not ideal for
First-time founders with no prior idea or domain experience to draw a 'warmer' direction from yet
From the transcript
“a good pivot is like going home you you know it's it's warmer it's closer to something that you”
“usually a successful pivot gets warmer instead of Colder from what you're an expert at and somehow Builds on what you learned on the prior…”
“there was no Universe where they would have made up the idea for Segment because they didn't know anything about how analytics worked”
“someone someone has to get over this barrier they have on why they don't want to work on a certain idea”
From the episode
Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more
Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director)