I spent about a week in the doldrums, but then I felt angry, and decided I wasn't going to let their decision define me. I decided to build an app to show what I could do.
I spent 2 1/2 months building an app called Dashku. It was a realtime dashboard, and when I put it on Hacker News, it went to #1 within 45 minutes, and then the server fucked up because the ulimit config on the app server (which I had set but not persisted between reboots) was 1024, and got the flak I deserved for not making sure that the ulimit config has persisted when I configured the machines.
After doing it, these things happened:
- Bechtel contacted me and asked if they could use it internally. They did.
- I had a meeting with Geckoboard. They asked if I wanted to work for them, and I offered to sell Dashku to them. No bite.
- I interviewed at Forward Labs in London. I had about 4 interviews in the space of 2-3 days, but did not get the job offer. I failed to refactor a fill detection algorithm which was functional and fully tested, but memory inefficient. I had stayed up all night to crack it, slept for 2 hours and had no food when I came in for the interview and was asked to refactor it.
ProTip: Sleep well and eat before you go for an interview, otherwise your brain suffers for it.
Eventually, I got a job in London working for webcasting company, and then open sourced Dashku. Here's what happened next:
- Ninja Blocks gave me a free Ninja Block, and asked me if I would like to work with them.
- An Indian health startup asked to integrate Dashku into their IoT robotics app.
- A BI startup basically took Dashku, slapped a coat of paint on it, and called it their own.
- Another IoT startup asked to use it.
- An energy company told me they were going to drop Geckoboard for my app.
- I discovered a professional social network (called Viadeo) had created a wonderful collection of widgets for it.
Then,
- I got an email from someone at Facebook, they said that they were evaluating it for internal use, and asked me if I would like to interview with them in California.
I had to decline as my mother has health problems and I could not move to another country.
All of this, within 14 months of being fired from a startup.
Failure feels like crap, but don't let it define who you are; you have to move on and prove to yourself and to others what you can achieve. I've done that now and found peace with that period in my life.
I should probably thank the guy who fired me.