Mark Zuckerberg described his biggest management mistake as getting into acquisition talks when he didn't want to sell Facebook. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple but found his passion again by starting over. After Slideshare was acquired, the founder enjoyed her time at LinkedIn and focused on building something that lasted. Sara Blakely avoided telling others about Spanx at first to avoid doubts hindering her pursuit. Richard Branson took on larger airlines by focusing on quality and the right people.

3. The TALE
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg described his own executive
mistakes when negotiating a potential acquisition: “The only
reason why it’s this big story that everyone knows, that we
turned down a lot of money, is frankly because I messed up the
process. If you don’t want to sell your company, don’t get into a
process where you’re talking to people about selling your
company. Honestly, I think that was one of the biggest
management mistakes that I made in Facebook’s history.”

4. The LESSON
“It’s not clear to me that the answer is you should turn down
offers. In our case it was, not because the company became
more valuable, but because it was what we wanted to do. If you
start a company, and you own and control the company, then
you should take the company in the direction that you think it
should go in.”

6. The TALE
Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985 and has described it as a traumatizing, yet
defining, moment of his life: “I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life.
Woz [Steve Wozniak] and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We
worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage
into a $2bn company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest
creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got
fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we
hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me and
for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to
diverge and eventually we had a falling-out. When we did, our board of directors
sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus
of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.”

7. The LESSON
“Something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did.
The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had
been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start
over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from
Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness
of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me
to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

9. The TALE
In 2012, LinkedIn made a big splash in the professional
presentation sharing space by acquiring Slideshare. For co-
founder Rashmi Sinha, it could have spelled the end of her tenure
at the company she had spent years building into a successful
platform. It would have been easy to walk away or get sucked
into internal power politics within the organization post-
acquisition: “Many founders...face a very turbulent time after
acquisition.”

10. The LESSON
“As a founder, the thing I wanted the most was to build
something that lasted. I am proud of the team we built – and how
it continues to go from strength to strength from a product /
growth perspective, while adapting within LinkedIn. I enjoyed my
time at LinkedIn, after the acquisition. I made good friends and
learnt a lot about how bigger companies work.”

12. The TALE
After conjuring the idea for Spanx in the late 90s, Sara Blakely
avoided the typical entrepreneurial route of telling her inner
circle about it: “I kept my crazy idea from my friends and family
for a year.” For Sara, her biggest champions and supporters were
potentially her biggest liabilities in the pursuit of her passions.

13. The LESSON
“Ideas are the most vulnerable in their infancy. Family and friends
often express concern or doubts (out of love) that can stop
people dead in their tracks. Share once you’ve invested enough
of yourself in it, to the point when you know there is no turning
back. If you share too soon, ego has to get involved and you will
spend more time explaining and defending your idea rather than
pursuing it. But definitely tell the people that can help move your
idea forward.”

15. The TALE
Taking on your biggest competitors, who have the weight of
brand recognition and success in their favor, is never an easy
task. That was the situation Sir Richard Branson found himself in
when he started his own airline in 1984: “When we started with
Virgin Atlantic, we had one second-hand 747. We were up against
about 16 different airlines, all of whom had more than 100 planes
each.”

16. The LESSON
“What I’ve learned is you can go into industries which are much
bigger than you if you get the quality right and you get the right
people, you can achieve miracles. The only way that a carrier like
Virgin America can survive and thrive is to make sure we
continue to make every single little detail better than our
competitors.”

17. SOURCES
Startup School (Y Combinator) 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWKUoabjjxg
Stanford Commencement Address, June 2005: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-jobs-stanford-
commencement-address
http://rashmisinha.com/2015/01/23/end-of-an-era/#more-465
http://mariashriver.com/blog/2012/04/sara-blakely-founder-and-owner-spanx/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/09/screw-it-just-do-it-advice-from-sir-richard-branson-for-entrepreneurs/
Images:
qoppi / Frederic Legrand – COMEO (Shutterstock.com)
SGM / Featureflash (Shutterstock.com)
Peterfz30 / Prometheus72 (Shutterstock.com)

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