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Failure: The Blog  

August 2018

  • When This Executive Was Fired, He Took Charge
  • Obeying The Speed Limit Has Never Been More Fun
  • London Black Cabs Helped Uber Grow
  • Bette Graham Created A Product To Fix Her Mistakes
  • Flamin' Hot Cheetos Had An Interesting Start

July 2018

  • Fear This Instead Of Failure
  • Re-Releasing Songs Created Success
  • A CEO's Purposeful Mistake
  • The Tardy Student And The Unsolvable Problem
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June 2018

  • A Surprising Mistake In The Oxford English Dictionary
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  • Eddie Shore Was Truly A Tough Guy
  • [Video] Elon Musk Didn't "Pivot" He Failed

May 2018

  • 8 Examples of Mental Toughness Part 2
  • Necessity Turned Accessory: Allen Iverson's Sleeve
  • This Doctor Has Continued To Fail
  • 8 Examples of Mental Toughness
  • MIT Accidentally Creates New Smelting Process

April 2018

  • Johnny Cash Quit Singing Lessons
  • Cruise Control Came Out of Frustration
  • Time Spent Gaming Pays Off In The Navy
  • Rock Around The Clock Was a Commercial Failure
  • Sigmund Freud Should Have Been Discouraged

March 2018

  • Superman Couldn't Fly
  • This School Shares Failures
  • Jim Croce's Parents Hoped He Would Fail

[More archives...]

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A Case For Failing »

From Broke to Multimillionare

April 2nd, 2012 - by Robby Slaughter

Who says you have to have to money to make money? Last month, a guy who barely could pay his rent sold his company for $180 million.

The story comes from the online magazine Complex, which writes:.

If you’re toiling away at a low-paying job with a dwindling bank account hoping for your big break, here’s a bit of inspiration: Charles Forman, founder of iPhone game maker OMGPOP, was living paycheck to paycheck last week, and now he’s a multimillionaire.

…

“I had $1,700 in my bank account yesterday, and now I have a whole lot more,” he said.

OMGPOP sold for $180 million last Wednesday with a reported additonal $30 million earnout. Forman wouldn’t reveal how much of the sale went into his own pocket, but he said it was “way more” than $22 million.

Omgpop failure
Photo © Flickr User Rob Enslin

Complex, by the way, quoted a New York Times story—which is even more amazing.

Omgpop had been limping along until Draw Something, a smartphone game it introduced just seven weeks ago, became a breakout hit. That drew the attention of Zynga, the maker of FarmVille and the current king of social games, which last week bought Omgpop for $180 million.

Draw Something transformed Omgpop from a little-known, nearly broke start-up into a must-have for an industry giant.

But it doesn’t end there. More from that same piece:

Omgpop did not start as a game company. Six years ago, Mr. Forman, a workout enthusiast whose Facebook page features a close-up of his abdominal muscles, founded what was then called I’m in Like With You, a dating site where users could essentially put themselves up for auction.

“The entire company started as a joke, honestly,” Mr. Forman said. He saw the site as a form of entertainment, he said, and only later realized that people were spending a lot of time on it. To capitalize on that audience, he converted it into a game site and renamed it Omgpop. “It’s one for the record books,” he said of the success of the company. “It is something I did not expect.”

Failure is the secret to success. You’re going to screw up. You’re going to struggle. You’re going to experience life as an unknown. You’re going to have to scrape together money to live, and you’ll never know what’s coming next.

But if the nature of your business is that you could strike it big, that failure is an important part of the process.

Failure keeps happening. It’s essential. Embrace it.

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