Written By: Marc Halpin
Several years ago, two young founders started a tech company. A smart idea aiming to help government agencies with traffic data intelligence.
But they had a problem. Both founders were software engineers, and they needed to develop hardware to optimize their product. They were introduced to a hardware specialist who quickly jumped on board.
The team worked diligently for the next 12 months to develop a prototype.
Their big day came when a large prospective customer wanted to see a product demo. After all their efforts, on demo day the product failed to work. The sale did not happen.
The company bumped along for several years and landed some customers, but ultimately was not a success. Arguably the founders and the company failed.
Some 2/3rds of companies fail so what’s so special about this story?
It’s about what happened next. The founders learned a couple of important lessons from their first company, dusted themselves off and started a new company.
Paul & Bill later sighted that if it wasn’t for their experience at their first company, they wouldn’t have built the second. Their failure was foundational to their ultimate success.
Their first company was called Traf-o-Data.
You know the rest of the story…
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