The big meeting is finally here. You practiced the pitch again on the drive over and told yourself this one is different.
Twenty minutes later, you’re back in the parking garage with a polite pass and a stomach that won’t settle. That sour feeling is part of the game. It comes with building something you believe in.
Melanie Perkins, Frederick W. Smith and Arianna Huffington hit that wall. Before their names became synonymous with success, each founder came dangerously close to watching the whole thing fall apart.
Facing Investor Rejection
Melanie Perkins built the accessible design platform Canva through a fundraising stretch that would’ve flattened most entrepreneurs.
More than 100 investors said no to her pitch.
Perkins refused to romanticize it. Every single rejection hurt, she’s said—but she also used each one to sharpen the pitch that came next.
That’s the key entrepreneurs can miss while they’re busy nursing the bruise. She treated the meetings as research to improve her business.
When an investor claimed Canva looked like another company, she created a slide that mapped the gap it was filling. When someone said the design market was too small, she walked them through the size of the industry.
The next pitch got better and better because the last one exposed the weak spots.
Today, Canva has grown into a business valued at about $42 billion, and Perkins now ranks among the world’s richest self-made women.
Surviving Startup Setbacks
Fred Smith founded FedEx on an idea that everyone told him would fail.
As a Yale student in the 1960s, Smith wrote an economics paper outlining a hub-and-spoke system that could move packages across the country overnight. The concept sounded ambitious on paper and building it nearly broke him.
Smith launched Federal Express in 1971, but planes, fuel and payroll burned through cash faster than the young company could bring it in.
Then came the gamble that became a part of often-shared FedEx lore.
After a funding setback left the company with only a few thousand dollars, Smith flew to Las Vegas and took the remaining cash to a blackjack table. After a few rounds, he walked away with enough money to cover a fuel bill and keep planes in the air.
That bought FedEx time. Roughly one more week, as the story goes. That week gave Smith another chance to find funding, keep packages moving and prove customers wanted what he was building.
Eventually, overnight delivery stopped looking like an expensive gamble and started looking like something businesses couldn’t operate without.
Handling Repeated Denial
Arianna Huffington’s low point arrived one rejection letter at a time.
Thirty-seven publishers turned down her second book. By her own account, things got especially bleak around rejection No. 25. She was broke, depressed and running out of options.
Still, she wasn’t ready to give up. Chest held high, Huffington walked into a bank and asked for a loan. She had no assets, but the banker took a chance on her anyway. That money kept her afloat as more rejection letters arrived.
Then, finally, No. 38 was the “yes” she’d been waiting for. Her book found a home at last.
Years later, Huffington would need that same tolerance for rejection when she launched The Huffington Post in 2005. Critics dismissed the site as a vanity project, but she ignored the negative feedback and published anyway.
The Huffington Post went on to become a global media brand in just six years. The platform, rebranded in 2017 as HuffPost, has expanded into 17 markets and reached six continents.
At rock bottom, Huffington didn’t need everyone to believe in her. She just needed to keep going long enough to find someone who did.
Moving Forward After Rejection
Maybe the meeting went badly or the client chose someone else. Eventually, you have to make a choice.
Are you going to refine or let rejection decide your future?
Fix what needs it, find another route and make the next call. You don’t need to know how the story ends yet; you just need to keep it from ending here.
Featured image from wellphoto/Shutterstock
