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When Life Hands You Lemons...
By Vivek Wadhwa   |   Wednesday,August 12,2009   |    1 Comments
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while, it felt as thought the sky were falling. But with lots of hard work, we solved every critical problem and turned almost all our customers into loyal references for ourselves. And our startup grew into a magnificent public company, with $100 million in revenue.

SUDDEN CRISIS. Most people think that, once you've taken your company public, you've achieved success and live happily ever after. That couldn't be further from the truth. The public markets are very fragile, and it doesn't take much for a company's star to fall.

As often happens in the tech world, there were some last-minute delays in sales, and the company missed its numbers one quarter. It suffered the retribution that follows. To my dismay, not only did the public markets decimate the value of our stock but also customers behaved like deer in the headlights, analysts turned sour on us, employees started focusing only on their paper losses, and disagreements ensued.

As a tech guy, I found it easy to stay out of the battle zone. It was difficult, however, to watch the rapid destruction of a team and culture that took so many years to build. We went from hotshot tech execs to targets of intense criticism. It was enlightening to experience how the world can turn on you overnight, and how superficial success itself is. And I got to learn who my real friends were.

UNANTICIPATED SUPPORT. I took to heart all these lessons when I started my own company in the late 1990s. We built a great team, excellent technology, and made sure to satisfy every customer. Analysts and clients alike lauded us, and we received attention from major publications. When investment bankers knocked on our doors offering an early IPO, we resisted the temptation.

When the tech bubble burst in 2000, I learned another valuable lesson: You can do just about everything right and still face failure. Even though we were not a dot-com and had a solid foundation, the downturn hit us hard. It felt like a meteor had slammed into Silicon Valley and wiped out most intelligent life in the tech sector. Customers simply stopped purchasing nonessential software. Out of the blue, a financial crisis hit us, and I had no choice but to cut costs and downsize the company.

Life sometimes presents very positive surprises. I was blown away when my management team offered to defer pay until things improved. And our rank-and-file employees volunteered to take across-the-board salary cuts. Some even continued to show up for work after we laid them off.

EVERYTHING'S TEMPORARY. With venture capitalists, reeling from their own losses, simply not funding, my management team and personal friends invested their own savings to get the company through the crisis.

Thanks to dedication like this, it didn't take long to turn the company around. At a time when so many tech outfits were going out of business, we were riding high. We had just taken failure and turned it into a big success.

Then came a health scare for me and my eventual foray into the film world (see BW Online, 1/21/04, "Bollywood, Here I Come"). In a nutshell, I've found that success is always temporary, and that failure always serves as the motivation to do better.

GETTING THERE. I spend a lot of time mentoring fledgling entrepreneurs, and know some very accomplished people. Like me, all of them have endured major failures along the way. The most successful are the ones who take as much pride in their failures as their successes.

The most enlightened understand that the journey is the reward.

The author of the article is Vivek Wadhwa, a Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and an Executive in residence at Duke University.
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Reader's comments(1)
1: Dear Mr. Vivek,
its nice thoughts, I am agree with you on though "success is always temporary, and that failure always serves as the motivation to do better". I am developing the Agriculture Business Centre and I experienced lot of trouble sometime i get frustrated but I had not give up and now all is going on track.
thanks for good encouraging thoughts.
With regards.

Sharad Pant
Sierra Leone
Freetown
Posted by:Sharad Manohar Pant - 12th May 2011
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