Owning Failure
Instead of moping around and wallowing in misery of rejection, Acton sprang into action.
By: Vithal C Nadkarni
In May 2009, social media giant Twitter rejected Brian Acton’s job application. The software engineer was philosophical, “That’s ok. (Anyway, it) would have been a long commute.”
A couple of months later, he got rejected by Facebook and the engineer, who had 11 years’ experience with tech behemoths such as Apple and Yahoo!, was even more philosophical on Twitter, “Facebook turned me down.
It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life’s next adventure.” Acton’s next life adventure entailed teaming up with another fantastic colleague from Yahoo!, Jan Koum.
They went on to build a company that in scarcely four years became the King Kong of cloud-based messaging, which Facebook recently bought for a whopping sum of $19 billion.
One moral of the story is that instead of moping around and wallowing in misery of rejection, Acton sprang into action. Acton and Koum went on to build on their dream of providing services without getting fixated on advertising or scooping information about users.
In refusing to “turn a user into just another product in the age of data-mining”, the duo took a calculated risk that had profoundly moral and strategic angles: their company managed to amass twice as many users as the corporation that had once rejected the co-founder!
The other moral of this inspirational saga entails ownership of failure and sharing of success that, in turn, are related to the loneliness of flying against the flock into a position of leadership. With failure comes risk; both are essential in the saga of success.
In May 2009, social media giant Twitter rejected Brian Acton’s job application. The software engineer was philosophical, “That’s ok. (Anyway, it) would have been a long commute.”
A couple of months later, he got rejected by Facebook and the engineer, who had 11 years’ experience with tech behemoths such as Apple and Yahoo!, was even more philosophical on Twitter, “Facebook turned me down.
It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life’s next adventure.” Acton’s next life adventure entailed teaming up with another fantastic colleague from Yahoo!, Jan Koum.
They went on to build a company that in scarcely four years became the King Kong of cloud-based messaging, which Facebook recently bought for a whopping sum of $19 billion.
One moral of the story is that instead of moping around and wallowing in misery of rejection, Acton sprang into action. Acton and Koum went on to build on their dream of providing services without getting fixated on advertising or scooping information about users.
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In refusing to “turn a user into just another product in the age of data-mining”, the duo took a calculated risk that had profoundly moral and strategic angles: their company managed to amass twice as many users as the corporation that had once rejected the co-founder!
The other moral of this inspirational saga entails ownership of failure and sharing of success that, in turn, are related to the loneliness of flying against the flock into a position of leadership. With failure comes risk; both are essential in the saga of success.
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