[phd514]

I was ~1.5 years out of college and at a small dot-com with a niche SaaS at the time. I distinctly remember 9/11 and the chill that came over our office that day. That passed in time, but our economic prospects never recovered. I used to hit the gym in the mornings and then work ~10am-7pm and I distinctly remember the day ~9 months later when the VP of engineering called me on my cell while I was finishing up my workout and asked when I would be in the office. He said to come straight to his office when I got in. About 85% of the company was laid off that day and I was among the "lucky" ones who was not.

What followed was almost straight out of the Silicon Valley sitcom. Management know our existing product was a dead-end, but with 85% of the company laid off, our remaining VC funds gave us a decent runway, so they decided to pivot to ... something. That is, the entire company (about ~15 of us) would sit around in the boardroom and try to come up with new product ideas. Needless to say, that went precisely nowhere.

The CEO was pushed out fairly shortly after that and I had been brought in through his network. My layoff came about ~6 months later in the second round of layoffs which constituted only me. Thanks to the VP of engineering going to bat for me, I did get 3 months of severance. I spent 9 months looking for another job and finally found one in fintech in NYC which turned out the be, to this day, one of the best jobs of my career. I also met my now-wife and many of my best friends there. That time was both the most traumatic experience of my working career and the best thing to happen to me at the same time. I know it was much harder on many other people, but it turned out for the best for me.

[adrianmonk]

I know of one company that actually managed to pull off the pivot thing!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TippingPoint

They switched from an internet appliance (kind of like an early Chromebook) to smart deep packet inspection firewalls. Not a ton in common between those except that they both require hardware to be built.

If I remember right, local lore was that they pulled it off partly by realizing early that they needed to change direction and being well-funded enough that they had enough cash to start over.

[SamuelAdams]

Here's another example of a successful pivot:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18063362

Posting anon.

In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go.

To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in the SF startup scene. One company that I really liked and did some small stuff for was Burbn, which was a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged around taking photos of your location.

Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my inner circle were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and they went finance, sigh), I decided to leave SF to head to NYC and get a fresh start.

As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I emailed my contact at Burbn and said I was likely to be unavailable for any more work, but that I liked the project and hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that he was near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested, there might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was mentally done with SF and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111 Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like RockYou, etc.) as it was then.

That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.

[mcdevilkiller]

Ouch! I hope your fresh start paid off, though.

[ido]

Didn't slack start as a game studio? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History

[forgotmypwd123]

So did Flickr. Same guy behind it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield

[zeckalpha]

Not in the dot-com years.

[tropo]

Novell was a successful pivot. Novell started as a hardware company, with a proprietary computer based on the 68000. That bombed, so the pivot was to NetWare. That dominated PC networking for about 15 years.

[lackbeard]

I graduated from college and entered the industry just post-bust (early 2002.) I went to work for a company that had, 6 months prior, laid everyone off and decided to pivot with the remaining VC cash. I think it took them 3 or 4 months to figure out what the new company would be. That strategy wound up being successful for them (us, I guess...)

[galangalalgol]

I started about a year before you. I went into embedded rtos stuff. At the time it was comparable to the beat SV offers and by the time SV recovered enough to start offering double or perhaps triple embedded rates, I had learned i actually liked it an felt the amount of domain specific knowledge i had aquired was a good investment. I'm not sure that was the case, but at 40 having never changed jobs from that original corporation, I think I at least got stability and fun work out of it.

[ido]

I finished high-school in 2001 and started working straight away (before college, I continued working part time during my studies). Being cheap was probably a big part of why I got and kept that first job for 4 years! I was paid a little above minimum wage.

[Spinosaurus]

> found one in fintech in NYC

I'm interested in hearing which, if you care to share.

[phd514]

Well, it was nearly 20 years ago and with SoX and all the other regulations, the fintech industry now is essentially unrecognizable from what it was then. I worked for a bulge-bracket investment bank whose business today is dramatically different and a hedge fund that is no longer solvent. The reason it was good for me was that I was an inexperienced developer and I got to work with much more talented developers in an environment where results mattered. I learned a lot and became a lot better myself.

[aedron]

9/11 was well after the dot-com crash. It didn't help, though.

[ido]

the crash was not a singular event, 9/11 was at the tail end of it but it was crashing for a good 2 years or so from 2000-2002/3 (look at a graph of the NASDAQ from the 90s till today).

[ghaff]

Yep. I worked for a small company that had been struggling through the dot-com slowdown. But 9/11 was basically the precipitating event for its final tailspin. I was laid off a week or two later and it continued to spiral down over the next 6-12 months.

[semiotagonal]

Did the company manage to IPO before it tanked?

[phd514]

No. And, thankfully, I had not early-exercised any of my options, either.

[cortesoft]

I went through something very similar at a startup around 2010 (layoffs, new runway because of layoffs, random pivots trying to find anything to work)... so I guess some things never change!

[watt]

> it turned out for the best for me

Survivorship bias. What could have happened is that you spend 12 months looking for another job, nothing, you lose your house, end up on street, take some minimum wage job, never comment on HN. We don't get to see stories like that.

The stories we see is where it did turn out good. That's the commonality: you must step out of the comfort zone for something good to happen. However something good does not happen to everyone 100% of time.

[stdbrouw]

Bias entails the misrepresentation of a population, but "for me" implies that the population consists of only himself, so the term bias is nonsensical in this context.

[rezz]

What value does a comment like this add? The question asks for the perspective of someone during the dot com bust and this was his.

[theworld572]

"for me" is the key part of the sentence you quoted. If he had said "for everyone" then yes that would have been survivorship bias, but he did not.

Though if you are trying to point out the fact that we might get a skew towards success stories in this thread because those who actually made a success of the dot com crash are more likely to post about it then those who failed then I would probably agree with you.