5. Understanding How Failing a Job Interview May Be a Source of Innovation: The Case of WhatsApp Founders

In most cases, failure is perceived as a disappointment and drags down the person experiencing this misfortune. However, disappointment can also be a blessing in disguise. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how failure can lead to innovation and success. To carry out the research, a thorough literature review is conducted with the aim of bringing out the linkages between failure, success and innovation. Therefore, secondary data is introduced, with the focus on Peter Drucker’s research. When people make mistakes, generally they stared in the face, and often they find it so upsetting that they miss out on the primary benefit of failing: the chance to get over human egos and come back with a stronger, smarter approach. However, this chapter shows that success and innovation come through rapidly fixing mistakes rather than getting things right the first time. This chapter has discussed the importance of not giving up after a disappointment or a failure of any nature. In most cases, people lose direction and even hope after they have experienced failure. Fortunately, innovation may come to their rescue. In fact, innovation requires focus and abnegation. In general, some people are more talented innovators than others, but their talents lie in well-defined areas and can be lost when facing difficulties. Innovation requires therefore knowledge, ingenuity and, above all else, focuses from the person wishing to benefit from it. With innovation, as in any other human endeavour, there is talent, there is ingenuity and there is knowledge. But when all is said and done, what innovation requires is hard, focused, purposeful and genuine work. Because innovation is conceptual and perceptual, would-be innovators that must also go out and look to get new ideas, ask questions and listen responses that may assist them to get ‘out of the box’ in which they find themselves. Successful innovators use both the right and left sides of their brains; meaning that they are always looking to move from their comfort zone to get new insights. They work out analytically what the innovation has to be to satisfy an opportunity; an opportunity arisen from any inopportune event. Then they go out and look at potential users to study their expectations, their values, their failures, their successes and their needs. As it has been explained in this chapter, what remains remarkable about the WhatsApp’s rise to success is the story of its founders; Jan Koum and Brian Acton who were no strangers to failure, and their incredible journey speaks volumes about the value of tenacity and vision in human life. Today, as noted by Nguyen (2014), Jan Koum and Brian’s Acton company is the most valuable messaging platform on the planet, but they have experienced their fair share of rejection by top tech companies, including the one that eventually bought their service, Facebook.