Balaji Srinivasan: “If you have runway, you’re not dead. You iterate until you survive.”

One thing about pivoting.

And so on and so forth. Has anybody ever seen the very first.

Page that YouTube ever served? Do you know what YouTube was at the very, very beginning? Yes, that's right.

That's right. It was a dating site. You can go back to web.archive.org, and you can go and look at it. And PayPal was originally beaming money between palm pilots, and then they found the web thing was taking off and so.

They went and did that.

Does anybody know what Slack was before it was Slack?

That's right.

And Opsware, which Ben Horowitz sold for $1.6 billion, was Loud Cloud, this massive data center.

Operation, which had raised a.

Ton of money during the dot com.

Boom and went all the way down and came all the way back up.

Even Google actually initially thought that it was going to make its money from enterprise search and from the enterprise search appliance, and that was a non starter. And actually Overture came up with the concept of like auctioning ads, and Google.

Basically, you know, just.

Copied them and executed it better. I mean, I'm glad in some ways that the word has entered the lexicon.

But basically.

You iterate until you achieve product market fit.

And then you accelerate.

So my answer is, if you have the Runway, you're not dead. You iterate until you survive and thrive and then you grow and.

Then you become big. That's worked for many other people and hopefully it'll work for you guys.