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The musicaly people were already veterans in Silicon Valley tech scene (not young under silicon valley standard & with years of working experience).

They raised money to build education product with short videos in it.

The education product was not doing well. So they cut everything and kept the short video part.

Sounds familiar?

YouTube was initially a dating website with videos. Then they cut the dating part and kept videos.

Instagram was initially a checkin app with photos. Then they cut the checkin part and kept photos.




Flickr: initially an image management/sharing tool for a 2d online game. Cut the game, kept the image sharing.

Slack: initially an internal communication tool for another incarnation of the same game. Cut the game, kept the chat.

(An incarnation of this game did briefly exist between these two, but only lasted about a year.)



What was the game called?


Glitch.


I believe Slack reused some of the game’s graphics on their 404 page.


Fascinating! For curious, here are more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield#Career


For a second I thought you were going to mention vine.


With vine twitter went one step further and got rid of video part too




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