Fueled by Failure

Author:Jeremy Bloom [Bloom, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781613083079
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press

Successful Transitions

In 2012, I was asked by Young Presidents Organization, a global network of young chief executives, to give a keynote talk at their annual ski trip to Squaw Valley, California. David Karnstedt was one of the first people that I met there. He had recently sold his software advertising company, Efficient Frontier, to Adobe for $400 million, and because we were both building companies in a similar space, we had a lot to talk about. Today, David serves on Integrate’s board of advisors and is someone for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect.

Among the most inspiring things about David: He discovered a passion in a career he hated and transformed it into an industry that he enjoyed.

“I sold surgical equipment once upon a time, working from my home,” he says. “My office was essentially every hospital in the Midwest. I hated that job. I didn’t fail at it—in fact, I won rookie of the year at a sales conference. Then I quit,” says David, who wasn’t happy in surgical sales. However, there was something about the work that he did love. He was in medical sales at the time when arthroscopic and endoscopic surgery were becoming popular, and David discovered he had a real passion for the technology involved. “I loved this stuff. I just needed to find a job in another industry,” explains David, and he did just that. He later went on to run North American sales for Yahoo! and become the CEO of of a unified software advertising platform called Efficient Frontier, a company that would later sell to Adobe for $400 million.

Finding a passion makes transitioning into a new career infinitely more interesting. For athletes and some others, the need for a second passion is so important because a career can be so fleeting.

ROGER STAUBACH’S DUAL SUCCESS STORY

If you remember watching Roger Staubach play quarterback for Navy or in the NFL for the Dallas Cowboys, I envy you. I never saw Staubach play, but I know that he was a Heisman Trophy winner in 1963, then served in the Navy in Vietnam, returning to have an 11-year career with the Dallas Cowboys, taking them to four Super Bowls and winning two of them. Staubach won a most valuable player award and made the Pro Bowl six times in the 1970s.

He is also someone I greatly admire because he transitioned from being a Hall-of-Fame quarterback to building an amazing career in real estate. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Staubach’s transition is that unlike so many athletes, myself included, he did not wait until after football to plant seeds in hopes of finding something to do. Instead, he planted them, learned a business, and immersed himself in it while playing football.

“When I came out of the Naval Academy in 1965, I had a four-year obligation to the service, and we had three children that were born while in the Navy. In those days, they didn’t pay quarterbacks what they do today, and as a

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