I experienced failure first-hand multiple times throughout my career. Of course, I tried to learn from each failure, but it was like in a video game: As I progressed, the lessons became increasingly difficult and harder to put into practice. Ultimately, I applied them by helping to build more than 100 new business ventures, ensuring other leaders and their companies did not fall into the same traps. Allow me to share some of those lessons.
I started my first company while in high school in Switzerland in the mid-1990s, creating websites for small businesses. Afterwards, I joined the leading web agency in the nation at the time, and I could do some amazing things there, like creating the first online real estate platform for a bank—which I regard as my first big project. It failed miserably. No one wanted a real estate platform. I learned a valuable lesson there: You must build products that solve actual customer problems, as opposed to building what you want to offer as a business.
