My badge of failures
Behind every great success there are greater failures. Wear your badge of failures with pride.
Mine is a story of great failures…
My first great failure came when I was 3. Imagine the anxiety of young first-time parents, when their 3-year-old spoke only in monosyllables! Panicked, my mom took me to the doctor, only to hear there was nothing terribly wrong — but they were dealing with a minor speech impediment. That triggered many hours of practicing with marbles in my mouth. Fast forward a few years, I made it to the school debate team.
At the end of my junior year in undergrad, we had the so-called “campus interviews”. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was the first company to visit — they usually hired over a hundred candidates. There was a saying in my uni, “It’s easier to fail in any subject than to get rejected by TCS.” Overconfident, I strolled in without preparation and even without formal attire. I bombed on probably the easiest possible question in ECE (my major) “what is Amplitude Modulation?” It’s like asking in a marketing interview, “what is demand generation?”. The next company that came in was Wipro with one of the lowest acceptance rates. I was up two nights preparing for that interview. That was my first job. It’s also where I met my significant other.
I wanted to broaden my perspective from engineering to the business world. I applied to five business schools in 2002. I got into two (and rejected by the rest) — but they were not the ones that I really wanted to go to. So I decided to wait and build a stronger case given that software engineering was a very competitive demographic. Two years and many edits/re-edits later, I got in at two of my top choices and decided to go to Michigan. The rest is maize and blue.
Coming back to Silicon Valley after 2 years in Michigan was a dream come true. But after 3 years at Cisco, I found myself not looking forward to Mondays. Wanting to start something of my own, I teamed up with a coworker and started creating a business plan. After talking to 25+ potential candidates, we continued to have a hard time convincing a tech co-founder to join our team. After many failed pitches, we shelved it. As I was recovering from this failure, I got a call from Google. In a month I joined the Google Enterprise team.
I worked on Google Talk for Business for almost a year. The project was canned just seven days before launch — 7 days! The website was ready, the blog post was in place (edited and re-edited multiple times), and the press briefings already scheduled. I was heartbroken. My next product was Google Cloud Platform. I built marketing from scratch and launched the new brand at Google I/O — now it is a $1B+ business.
After Google, I lasted in my first startup for three months, and my second startup for nine months. It was a bad breakup. It took me months to recover. But I learned to be scrappy. I built a Twitter sentiment analysis app for generating leads for my sales team by coding in PHP and hosting the LAMP stack on Heroku. I ran marketing soup to nuts. The experience was priceless.
I tried climbing Matterhorn in 2011 and failed miserably returning 500 meters 🙈from the summit. My first attempt at running a marathon — I finished in 5+ hours, 1 hour behind my goal. So, the list goes on…
Let’s face it — growth is hard. Really f**king hard. It’s hard because we have great successes and great failures. As you start your day, ask yourself the question — what were my great failures yesterday, and what did I learn from it? If you are not failing, you are not pushing hard enough. Remember behind every great success there are greater failures. Wear your badge of failures with pride.
[Note: I wrote this post in July 2018 for an internal Atlassian blog.]