"Three days into joining YC, we decided to pivot. We’d been working on the dating site for six months at that point, and we knew it wasn’t working... Also, I’d read a study that said happy employees are twice as productive as unhappy employees. That was the beginning of AnyPerk."
After all the flak the word 'pivot' has gotten I'm surprised to see it used this way here. This does not seem like a pivot, but rather you just deciding to work on a completely new business. Were the two ideas related in any way? Did anything in the original dating business inform this new idea?
Presumably "the team" and "being in YC". Which is reasonable -- you're in a program with a time-limit, together in a foreign land, and you realise the idea you had isn't going anywhere. So they took their advantages (time in YC remaining) and applied them to a different problem/application.
After all the flak the word 'pivot' has gotten I'm surprised to see it used this way here. This does not seem like a pivot, but rather you just deciding to work on a completely new business. Were the two ideas related in any way? Did anything in the original dating business inform this new idea?