Focus Is Not a Pivot

The Insight

Founders love the word pivot because it sounds strategic. It implies you saw something, reoriented the ship, and found a new direction. Most of the time what actually happens is less glamorous. You stop doing four things so you can do the one thing that is working.

That is not a pivot. It is subtraction.

Ev Kontsevoy went from Gravitational (a multi-product company with roughly $4M ARR split across Gravity and Teleport) to Teleport (an 8-figure ARR focused company with over 500 customers) by killing the other products and doubling down on the one that was pulling. He is explicit about how he describes it. "We didn't pivot, we just focused. We stopped doing like four out of five things we were doing at the time and just focused on Teleport."

The decision rule is simple. When one product is growing faster with fewer resources than everything else combined, stop defending the others and cut.

How They Did It

1. Look at pipeline, not current revenue. Gravity and Teleport were roughly 50/50 in revenue. That number tempts you to keep both. Pipeline tells the real story. COVID had killed Gravity's pipeline while accelerating Teleport's. The next 12 months of revenue was going to be one product whether they liked it or not.

2. Compare revenue per engineer on each product. Teleport had fewer engineers than Gravity but was generating the same revenue and growing faster. If one product is producing more output per unit of input, that is where the leverage is.

3. Commit publicly and rebrand. In November 2020, Gravitational became Teleport. That forced the internal conversation to stop. You cannot keep shipping a "side product" when the company name is the side product.

What Trips Up Founders

The sunk cost reflex. You spent years building the flagship. You have a team attached to it. Killing it feels like admitting you were wrong. But keeping a dying product alive because it used to be important is not loyalty. It is tax on the product that is working.

The revenue split argument. "We cannot walk away from $2M in ARR." Yes, you can. You are not walking away from revenue. You are walking away from the support, roadmap, and attention tax that the lagging product charges every week. The faster-growing product will make up that revenue in a quarter or two if you let it breathe.

Waiting for permission. Ev admits they waited too long. "We could have became Teleport actually much sooner, maybe a few months sooner." Founders look for a signal so strong it removes all doubt. It rarely arrives. If the direction is obvious to the team, that is the signal.

When This Doesn't Work

Do not cut the lagging product if the faster-growing one is still pre-revenue. You need the older product's cash flow to fund the new bet until it can stand on its own. In Teleport's case, the two products were already at revenue parity, which is the rare setup that makes this decision safe.

The Question

Ask yourself this. If we started this company today with what we know now, would we ship any of these secondary products?

If the answer is no, you already know what to cut. The only thing left is setting the date. You'll know within weeks whether the surviving product can carry the business. It usually can.