Outside the Silicon Valley world, there are numerous similar examples. J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter novel was rejected by 12 publishers, for instance.

The stupidest things can turn out to be hits. I read of a guy who decided to market an electric toothbrush in the early '90s, when that market was considered by skeptics to be mature and saturated. He was quite successful, as it turned out.

I guess the nature of entrepreneurship is that it's entirely unpredictable. Therefore, we can safely disregard the naysayers, even though they are accidentally right 9 times out of 10!

Well, that's the thing: if it was an obvious success from day one, others would have done it too.

That's not true. In the brief four months between being published and the author being revealed as a pseudonym it sold a respectable number of copies (8,500 across all formats - that doesn't sound like a lot, but it was at the time only published in the UK, and for a hardback book that is actually a large amount). By publishing industry standards it was commercially successful.

JK Rowling herself has said the number of copies the book sold in its first three months corresponds fairly well to the number of books she sold under her own name when she was initially published.

Yeah but that is most probably more due to her already existing contacts and thus she started a completely different place than others have to.

Luck does play quite a large part in this once the initial vetting for quality is done.

Or maybe she's better at writing fantasy books for children than crime novels?

> They had the chance to invest in the following companies early, but didn't: Intel, Google, Apple, FedEx, PayPal, and others.

This is misleading unless we know the list size in which these bypassed companies appeared. If the success/failure ratio is 0.01, then it should surprise no one that venture capitalists sometimes miss a winner while carefully investing in startups.

Excellent list...it is really very hard to get a vision across. Even when you have a functional product it is an uphill battle.

Part of the problem is that with almost all good ideas, you are trying to introduce a new reality where a familiar one already exist.

The problem is that it's hard to judge a company/startup solely based on what they're selling or their "big idea". Execution is a much bigger factor and can be harder to see.

Maybe, just maybe, they needed those rejections to become who they are today. Rejections are an important tool to test stability and force adaptability.