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You know all these people that I'm going to talk about, and probably you could know their
success stories, but what you missed is their fail more exactly their First Fail.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Tobias Lutke, Ben Silbermann,... Are all now
the most powerful and successful Founders in our century, but keep in your mind that they FAILED for the First Time, and they FAILED AGAIN Until they
Succeed! So that's the Spirit we should all have.
Here's a list of The 12 SUPER SUCCESSFUL FOUNDERS Who Failed First :
1. EVAN WILLIAMS - TWITTER
Before co-founding Twitter, Williams developed a podcasting platform called Odeo.
He realized it would be useful for people to have a central directory where they could search, download and listen to all the audio content on the web.
After 22 months, Odeo featured more than 2.1m pieces of sound. Still, it folded soon afterward when Apple announced the podcast section of iTunes.
2. REID HOFFMAN - LINKEDIN
Before co-founding LinkedIn and investing in big names like PayPal and Airbnb, Hoffman created SocialNet, an online dating, and
social networking site.
It focused on online dating and matching up people with similar interests, like golfers who were looking for partners in their neighborhood.
The combination of the site is ahead of its time and Hoffman's inexperience as a manager caused him to abandon the project in 1999. Still, it would provide invaluable insights that he would use in founding LinkedIn years later.
3. BILL GATES - MICROSOFT
The legend is that somewhere, presumably in a garage, a couple of high school kids produced a version of Basic that ran on personal computers and the rest just happened. The truth is somewhat different.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen had already set up a company, Traf-O-Data by the time they were 16 and 19 respectively and were already
making money from computing.
4. NICK WOODMAN - GO PRO
After school, Woodman founded two
startups, both of which never entirely made it off the ground.
The first was a website called EmpowerAll, which attempted to sell electronic goods for no more than a $2 markup and was quickly shut down after failing to get off the ground.
The second was Funbug, a
gaming and
marketing platform that gave users the chance to win cash prizes. A year later, in April 2001, the company was face down in the water, unable to gain traction among users.
5 - STEVE JOBS - APPLE
Steve Jobs' first business was selling "blue boxes" that allowed users to get free phone service illegally.
These boxes were designed in 1972 by Jobs' close friend and future co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. They worked by producing certain tones that were used in the telephone system to switch long-distance calls.
Once you made a long-distance call, you could use the box to enter operator mode, then use it to route your call to wherever you wanted for free. This made calls extremely difficult to trace and made blue boxes a popular item amongst various criminal elements.
The two stopped making the boxes after they were nearly caught by the police. Despite giving up on the venture, they reportedly made about $6,000 selling the blue boxes.
But it was the magic that two teenagers could build this box for $100 worth of parts and control 100's of billions of dollars of infrastructure in the entire telephone network in
the whole world.
"Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas. If we hadn't made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple."
6. KEVIN SYSTROM - INSTAGRAM
Kevin Systrom was a fan of Kentucky whiskeys. So when he created a location-based iPhone app (one driven by the success of networking app Foursquare), he named it after the booze.
Burbn let users check in at particular locations, make plans for future check-ins,
earn points for hanging out with friends, and post pictures of the meet-ups.
Burbn was not successful. The app was too complicated and had a jumble of features that made it confusing.
Systrom, however, kept tweaking the app. He paid attention to how people were using it and used analytics to determine how their customers were using Burbn.
His finding? People weren't using Burbn's check-in features at all. What they were using, though, were the app's photo-sharing features.
7. PETER THIEL - PAYPAL
A couple of Brainy Kids called Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel had been working on a payment system at their
startup Confinity.
They were trying to make it possible for owners of the Palm Pilot handheld to swap money via the infrared ports on the devices.
It was exciting technology, and no one else was doing it. However, the world's millions of Palm Pilot owners used their devices only episodically. Nobody needed their product, so they had no customers.
8. ANDREW MASON - GROUPON
In 2007 Andrew Mason created a website called The Point: a "
social good" fundraising site that ran on a "tipping point" system. A cause would only receive funding once the pledged donations reached a specific number.
It gained modest traction in Chicago but basically went nowhere.
One day, Lefkofsky raised an idea he thought could revitalize the struggling startup, based on a campaign he'd seen launched on The Point: a group of users decided their cause should be s
aving money.
Their plan was to round up 20 or so people who all wanted to buy the same product and see if they could get a group discount.
9. STEWART BUTTERFIELD - FLICKR
Stewart Butterfield's dream was to create a
gaming world where people played not for winning, but for the sake of interacting with people.
He and his team started building an MMO game – Game Neverending and released a prototype in 2002.
It was a very complicated
online game. As Butterfield admits, the concept was too weird and unfamiliar to people. The Game Neverending project was unable to raise money and was forced to shut down.
The game also included a photo-sharing tool, which turned out to be one of the most popular aspects. Butterfield decided to leverage this photo popularity and pivot to Flickr.
10. STEWART BUTTERFIELD (AGAIN) - SLACK
Despite his initial failure, Butterfield's dream to build the game Neverending was still alive.
With his success with Flickr, Butterfield raised over $17 million to build Glitch –
Game Neverending 2.0 with significant improvements in user experience and technology.
But again, some of its features were simply too strange. The company ran out of cash, and the game was shut down again.
Then (again) Butterfield and his team turned a byproduct of the game into something
successful.
During development, the Glitch team built an internal chat system, finding existing options unsatisfactory. Despite the already-crowded space in enterprise communication, Butterfield believed that his team has something unique to offer to the market. This marked their pivot into Slack.
11. BEN SILBERMANN - PINTEREST
Ben Silbermann started out working at Google, but as a non-engineer, he felt there was only so far that he could go in that culture.
He kept talking about doing a startup, but it was his girlfriend who told him,
"You should either do it or stop talking about it."
Ben set out to transform every cell phone into a clothing retail outlet with an app called Tote. It pulled data from online product catalogs to create a meta catalog for shoppers on the go.
Months after launching, it was clear that Tote wasn't going to work.
There were two big problems.
- People weren't using mobile apps for shopping. It was too early.
- Apple's App Store wasn't ready to support businesses built on the platform as it was too slow.
While Tote users weren't making purchases via the app, they were growing collections of "favorite" items to share with their friends. And that's how the idea for Pinterest was born.
12. TOBIAS LUTKE - SHOPIFY
Back in 2004, Tobias Lutke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake attempted to open their own online snowboard equipment store, called Snowdevil.
The shop wasn't successful at all. Still, they loved the storefront they created, so they decided to sell it to other businesses that needed a better online store. The rest is history.
Everybody enjoys a success story. Living out our fantasies through those who achieved success gives us hope it will happen to us.
But, listening to these stories doesn't do us any favors because those tales aren't the whole picture: the struggles, the tough breaks, the defeats that set the stage for the eventual big win.
Samuel Beckett:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.”
Lbiinga
Getting Rich From Scratch
