Internet Entrepreneur
Noah Kagan, Kickflip
He is 25 and candid. He is currently employed as the Director of Marketing for a small start up. He categorizes himself as someone who could have been a millionaire a few times over.
How did I get here today? Well, it’s all failure. Pretty much my whole life has been a failure. You usually only see the happy parts. No one ever sees failure. Frankly, I never thought I’d be this old. I thought I’d die. I don’t know. I didn’t come from the hood. I didn’t come from the streets. I’m from Cupertino, the most suburban area you’ll ever be in.
I got an internship with Microsoft my junior year at UC Berkeley. Normally, anyone who gets an internship gets the job. I was rejected.
I had a job offer at Google pre-IPO and they rescinded it for some reason. I don’t know, maybe they didn’t like me. I would have been really rich, pre-IPO Google.
Was going to go work at Wells Fargo and then I applied for a women only job at Intel. They were like, sure we’ll hire you. But not for the women’s job, for this other one. That would have been tight if I dressed up as a women to get the job though (Laughs).
With that, I went to Intel, and I loved Intel, but it was like the best and the worst for me. It was a job that was close to home, they paid me a lot of money for doing Excel work. But the people there were going home at 5 and they were soccer dads. That was their life. Some people that are at Intel are really unhappy…but that’s everyone in America.
I was really interested in meeting new people and talking about the web and being involved and making things happen. That’s what I say when people ask me what I do for a living. I used to say I worked at Walgreen’s because I didn’t want people judging me for better or worse based on my job. So what do I do? I make things happen.
I dropped a resume at Facebook because I like the web and I like people. I did a lot of college marketing to college businesses and so they offered me a job. I went in there, did product management for seven months. I made a lot of features, met a lot of people. Worked, fucking, nonstop. Lot of fun. And then, I wasn’t good there? I’m not sure what happened there, but I did get laid off. And Marky* and I maybe didn’t get along, I’m not sure.
Things happen. I have a tough time getting over things. But you just have to keep moving forward.
So how do you overcome failure?
Fuck. I’m horrible. Even this week there was a girl I liked…fuck, I’m shitty. I don’t. Really, it’s moving on to the next thing. Keeping yourself busy. When you move on to the next thing you kind of put things in the past. You have to accept it. What I’ve done with the Facebook thing is being honest with myself. So I got laid off. That’s a really hard fucking thing for people. Especially at a company where I’d be a millionaire.
So it’s on to the next thing and becoming a millionaire in other ways. To overcome failure is accepting it, being honest with yourself, and moving forward. And just giving it time. You know this is going to suck and you’re going to be sad, but it’s going to be that way. I don’t know, maybe smoke a lot of weed, eat, drink a lot, I don’t know, jerk it? Whatever you need to do to make you realize it will be better in the future.
I think the challenge with young people is that they’re often discouraged. They tell themselves they can’t do it, or that they have to go get experience from Microsoft. You’ll never get experience from Microsoft to run your own company. You’ll just get experience on how to run a corporate company. Or be in a corporate company. Or work in a cubicle.
I guess the advice I’d give is to accept the failure and know it is going to come. Maybe deal with it better…prepare yourself for that. Maybe whatever it is that I’m scared of doing, consider doing it. Be willing to take more risks. But that’s the thing! Why am I not taking more risks today then?
Postscript: Noah decided to start his own internet company four months after our interview. He decided to travel abroad to Argentina. “Why? Why not. Luckily the internet is everywhere, so I can work from anywhere.”
THERE ARE 3 RESPONSES TO THIS INTERVIEW
SuperJogos - Todos os jogos da internet » Noah Kagan: Passion as Forward Motion Says:
November 20th, 2007
[…] Read the rest of this great post here […]
Iguanaz » Noah Kagan: Passion as Forward Motion Says:
November 20th, 2007
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt Noah Kagan, president of software development company Kickflip, will tell you what he does for a living, but don’t make that your lead if approaching him at a cocktail party. “I hate that question,” says the 25 year old Berkeley grad, who has worked for at least four separate companies that should have made him rich, if he had stayed around long enough. Although money is a final result, this self-proclaimed “results oriented guy” is more concerned with making decisions in the moment, not buildi […]
Steve Says:
November 22nd, 2007
Good spirit. I couldn’t play the video, but the story is a good one. However, I do hope Noah stays put for while. Jobs are like relationships, however there is no instant perfection. Like relationships, jobs - the right fit - may take a form of committment.
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