Braden Kowitz

“What will make this project a success?” “What’s our unique advantage or opportunity?” “What’s the biggest risk?”

When it became obvious that Glitch wasn’t going to be a hit, the company did something strange. Instead of making a different game or closing down, they shifted their efforts to a side project: a messaging system they had originally built for their own use. The startup’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, had a hunch that this messaging system could be useful to other companies, too. So they launched it to the public, and named it

The lesson of Melitta Bentz is that great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision.