Why You Should Always Get Back Up If You Fail — Part 1
This is the first part of a story, a story of perseverance through adversity, and why you should be open to new ideas while not giving up.
In 2008 I was a system administrator at a medium-sized company. Like many of my coworkers, I would scour the web for news. One day I stumbled upon a new site called Techcrunch, focused on startups. Back then it wasn’t just high-level news, it was all these new companies, apps, and products — launching, failing, and getting acquired — I was sucked in. Mind you, this was before the Crunchies, before Disrupt, and way before they movie “The Social Network.” Basically, before startups were cool. Yet, what I’ll never forget is an ad on TechCrunch for a website called EDGE.IO.
Most of you probably don’t remember EDGE.IO, nor should you. What’s important is that the startup was from the founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington. Michael’s intention was never to make TechCrunch a leading publication for startup news, because he was actually creating his startup, making TechCrunch a side project “just to promote” Edge.
As people say, you never know where you’re going to end up or what you’ll end up creating. From Michael with TechCrunch, to the founder of Coca-Cola, to PayPal — once used to beam payments on handheld devices long before the iPhone. This idea that the destination could be so different from where one intended at first stuck with me, yet I never thought it would happen to me.
