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From Broke to Multimillionare

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.

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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