From Dried Fish to Digital Empires

In 1938, Lee Byung-Chul founded Samsung as a humble trading company in Korea. Its first products? Groceries, dried fish, noodles, and everyday goods. Nothing remotely tech.

Today, Samsung Group and its affiliates contribute over 22% of South Korea's GDP. That's not a brand. That's infrastructure.

It took just over 50 years to evolve from a local trader to a global semiconductor leader. Most companies don't survive that long, let alone reinvent themselves multiple times.

What changed? Not everything. Just everything that mattered.

Samsung never treated its founding story as destiny. It evolved with intent. From trading to textiles. From electronics to semiconductors. From local to global.

That's the real lesson: Where you start is irrelevant. Where you choose to finish is what defines you.

Too many companies romanticize their origin story and resist reinvention. They treat pivots as betrayal when they are often the only path to survival.

Nokia started as a paper mill. It pivoted into mobile but failed to pivot again when smartphones arrived. The cost? A $150B+ market cap collapse and over 140K jobs lost.

BlackBerry led an entire category. It eventually moved into cybersecurity, but only after losing the market it created.

In contrast, look at companies that embraced the pivot: Amazon started with books, now it has AWS and launches satellites. Netflix mailed DVDs, now it engineers Emmy-winning originals and AI-powered algorithms. Slack came from a failed game. Shopify sold snowboards. Nintendo made playing cards.

Reinvention wasn't a detour. It was the strategy.

The difference isn't vision. It's velocity. The market rewards those who move while others wait for permission.

I've seen this firsthand in fintech. Payment processors became full-stack financial platforms. Others clung to what made them relevant yesterday and disappeared.

My 3-Signal Rule for when to pivot:

1. Growth stalls for two consecutive quarters

2. A new technology makes your product feel dated

3. Your best customers ask for something you don't offer

Now ask yourself:

• •What part of your roadmap is just legacy comfort disguised as strategy?
• •What future are you already too late to catch unless you act now?

Where you start doesn't matter. What you cling to might. The future belongs to those who pivot with conviction.

What will you become before someone else does?

Speaking of hesitation, Apple Intelligence felt like using a BlackBerry in 2008 while the iPhone was already here. Slick branding as a life jacket, but the product lacked pulse.

Here's my contrarian take: Apple might be the next Nokia if it continues to prioritize polish over pioneering. The AI race will not wait for perfect execution. That's how momentum dies. Not in a headline. In a hesitation.

The next wave is already building. What's your plan to ride it?