4 Silicon Valley Mistakes That Turned Out To Be Successes

Some tech slip-ups have brought us our favorite modern apps and devices.
It’s easy to look at high-profile and successful inventions of the modern era and ask yourself: why didn’t I think of that? As a culture, we hold inventors in a high regard for their ingenuity, creativity and foresight. But the reality is that a lot of the devices, products and inventions we regard as most ingenious actually weren’t thought up ahead of time. Instead, they came about entirely by happenstance and accident, or even as an offshoot of another idea.  
These inventions range from the essential—the pacemaker, X-rays, etc—to the frivolous—artificial sweetener, Play Doh, you get the idea—but what they all have in common is that their inventor didn’t conceive of them beforehand.
Writing for The New York Times on the topic of “serendipity” and how it affects innovation, author Pagan Kennedy asks: “So how many big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs?” She points to a survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) which reported that as many as 50 percent of patents came as a side effect of “serendipitous processes”. She goes on to say that, “thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything.”
In the world of modern tech and digital technology, we see examples of this too. This runs somewhat counter to our image of the Silicon Valley developer, that being one of a determined, single-minded character who won’t stop until his lofty tech dream is coded into existence. But in reality, much of what we use in the tech space today comes from the result of accidents, or, in tech parlance: “pivots.” This happens when a developer or entrepreneur thinks they have a great, game-changing idea, but an unforeseen offshoot or segment of that idea ends up being what gains mass adoption. What’s most interesting is that this is often facilitated by the users themselves.
In truth, the pivot is more common than we realize and is the origin story for some of our favorite apps and services. Here are a look at some of the modern tech world’s most happy accidents:
Flickr: The photo-sharing service many of us use today was actually started as a video game that was distinguished for its dubious quality of not having an end goal. As it turned out, many aspects of the “Game Neverending” —which experienced several cycles of failure and reboot, thanks to the inventor’s determination—became the hallmark features of the Flickr service, including tagging photos, and controlling various levels of privacy permissions for a piece of content.
Instagram: Instagram’s predecessor, known as Burbn, was a side project of founder Kevin Systrom so he could learn how to code in his free time. A few unsuccessful iterations later, he decided to streamline the app a bit and take out various elements including a mix of check-in and gaming functions. Turns out that stripping down the app was the magic touch. Instagram is now the most popular photo sharing app.
YouTube: Launching on Valentine’s Day in 2005, YouTube’s founders thought their invention would be a way to facilitate online dating. How wrong they were. With little uptick in the dating realm, they realized their own users had a better idea of how to use their own invention. And thus the broad and multi-use video hosting site was born.
Nintendo: Before it was synonymous with some of the most classic and widely-loved video games and characters of all time, Nintendo was a manufacturer of playing cards. Founded in the late 1800s, the company operated for nearly 100 years in Japan before it was prompted to try a new angle when the bottom fell out of the playing card market. In the 1970s, with the release of its first video games, Nintendo began to grow into a global brand.