4 Startups Founders Who Bounced Back After Failing

Failure is a part of life, maybe even a bigger part of the business. If fear of failure is holding you back, take inspiration from the stories of these successful startup entrepreneurs who bounced back after major failures.

Apple has one of the greatest comeback stories in tech history. Founder Steve Jobs was fired from his company in 1985. Apple found itself operating at a loss, as it inched towards failure. In the 12 years that followed, in need of a new approach, Apple hired back Jobs in 1997 and he scored a partnership with Microsoft to invest $150 million in the company. A year later, the company introduced the iMac and for the first time since 1995, returned to profitability. The rest, as they say, is history.

Also known as the real life Iron Man, Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX both hit cash shortages just as the economy was tanking in 2008. SpaceX applied for a contract with NASA as its last hope to bail itself out and it won. The $1.6 billion contract has kept Musk’s space dream afloat.

At the same time SpaceX was crashing, Tesla was burning through about $4 million every month. Musk predicted SpaceX would win the deal and keep both of his space and car dreams alive. He took out a mortgage from SpaceX and scrounged around for $20 million. After a cliff to his investors, they agreed to meet the $20 million he raised, and the deal closed on Christmas Eve in 2008, hours before the company would have gone bankrupt.

Musk, who nearly went bankrupt launching Tesla Motors and rocket company SpaceX, is now worth more than $20 billion.

Evan Williams introduced “blogging” to the world when he launched Blogger in 2000. However it came without a business model, and a year later, Williams found himself out of cash and had to lay off the entire staff. Without any employees, Blogger dangled from a thin rope as Williams tried to find ways to make money out of it and turn it into a real challenging company. By late 2002, Google acquired the website for a reported $50 million. 13 years later, Blogger is alive even today. As for Williams, he did just fine cofounding Twitter and then Medium.

In the early 1990s, technology major IBM was on a downward spiral, with plans in place to break the company into several smaller operating units. Lou Gerstner took over the company in 1993 and started one of the greatest business turnarounds in tech. After huge layoffs and putting cash through marketing assets, Gerstner put the obstacles on the plan to break up the company and united everyone under one IBM. It worked, and the company survived.