The best companies in the world have all had predecessors.

In the councils of builders and wayfinders, where elders weighed the fates of ships and cities, a teaching like a compass was passed from palm to palm: “The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. ‘YouTube’ was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.” Thus speaks Kevin Systrom, and his saying is both lamp and map. It tells us that greatness is not born in its final robes, but arrives shivering, imperfect, waiting to be fitted by time. First comes the seed in borrowed soil; only later the tree whose shade we cannot measure.

Behold the courage inside this word predecessors. It confesses that our first forms are often wrong-sized: too narrow for the river we must cross, too blunt for the keyhole of destiny. When he names YouTube as a dating site, he is not mocking its awkward youth; he is honoring the holy right to iterate. In that early shell lived the future creature, hidden like a lion in a cub. The lesson is old as the forge: we hammer, we quench, we hammer again—until the metal admits its truer shape.

Consider how many banners were once plain cloth. Instagram itself sprang from Burbn, an overpacked app that shed its excess to keep one gleaming thread: photographs made swift and shared. Flickr began in the embers of an online game; Slack rose from the ruins of a studio’s failed world. Even the venerable Nintendo sold cards before it hosted kingdoms of play. In each story a chrysalis cracks. The first intent bows to the found truth. The form bends to the function the world is truly asking for. This is evolution in commerce: not betrayal of origins, but fidelity to purpose newly understood.

Let us place a tale beside the teaching. A young craftswoman—call her Elara—opened a stall selling carved walking sticks. Few bought them. But she watched her visitors linger over the inlays—the stories etched into wood, names plaited with symbols. So she set aside the staffs and learned to craft small keepsakes: talismans bearing the same patient art. The market answered like spring rain. “I have not failed,” she told her apprentice, “I have translated.” The stall did not abandon its soul; it found a vessel that carried it farther. Such is the pilgrim’s pivot: you turn, not because wind is fickle, but because the star has moved and you refuse to lose it.

Mark also the humility the proverb demands. To evolve is to admit that yesterday’s triumph cannot feed tomorrow’s city. The chorus of customers, like a tide, redraws the shoreline; the wise builder listens and moves the harbor. Pride clings to the first draft; leadership releases what no longer bears fruit. The vineyard keeper prunes—not to diminish, but to multiply. So with ventures: prune features, prune habits, prune vanities, that the vine may breathe and bear.

Let the lesson be nailed where all can read it. First, honor your predecessors—not only the companies before yours, but your own earliest attempts. Study them for signal amid the noise. Second, prototype relentlessly; make many small bets so that truth can find you quickly. Third, measure with honesty: keep numbers that sting and stories that heal. Fourth, cultivate the pivot as a virtue—name it plainly, frame it as learning, and execute it with craft, not panic. Fifth, preserve the core flame: mission over methods, outcome over ornament.

And let your actions be simple and brave. Each quarter, ask: What is the customer telling us that our roadmap refuses to hear? Each month, kill one feature to feed a stronger one. Each week, ship something that embarrasses last week—because it learned. Each day, practice the sentence that frees a future: “We were wrong, and now we see.” For the best companies do not arrive as monuments; they travel as caravans, exchanging goods with the desert, altering their tents to better hold the wind. Keep moving. Keep listening. Keep evolving—until the work that sought a buyer becomes the work that serves a world.