On Persistent Failure — Tales from a Reject
It has been three years since I started at King’s College London. During this time, I have experienced failure, time and time again.
On a career front — In my first year, I tried to start a team-management tool centered around the calendar called Timelens. An alpha product was never deployed. The team pivoted to being a software house, despite scoring 6-figure contracts, our lack of depth led us to collapse again. We even lost money. In my second year, I tried to figure out what I wanted and attended many industry conferences. I couldn’t find out what I was passionate about. During the summer of my second year- While my peers were doing internships at glorious places, I was bumming about alone in London. Too lost to return home to Singapore. Riding my bicycle, meditating and finding nothing. In my third year — I applied for internships and naturally, I experienced many rejections because I did not have prior experience in the fields I wanted to get into. There was a portfolio problem.
On student activities — In my first year, I ran for president of the Singaporean Society and lost. I was too arrogant and did not concentrate enough on the grassroots effort. In my second year, I ran for president of the Politics, Philosophy and Law society. Once again I lost, for lack of grassroots effort.In my third year — I started a society, and we grew at an extraordinary rate, but, my inexperience again crippled me in many ways as I made many mistakes. I lost team members, offended a couple people, lost key projects. Many people think the kcl blockchain project isn’t worth their time as well. So it has been difficult to expand our team.
Failure is at core of my school life.
In September 2017, I attended the World Blockchain Forum, London. I met two amazing people — John Kaplan and James Dean Galitsis. Two Hustlers. Hanging about with them for 2 days. I realised I wanted to be a hustler in Blockchain as well. It looks fun. The two of them envisioned their own reality and pursued it relentlessly. I wanted to be like them. Moreover, Blockchain meant we got to hang out with the coolest people — top lawyers, technologists, dreamers who aspired to change the world. I tried to get involved. Obviously, with little knowledge, people I approached tend to reject me. I continued to iterate.
Today I am proud to a certain degree of the small organisation that I have built that have enabled me and others to participate in the blockchain space. As a society, we were rejected from many places, but we still managed to secure paid internships for some of our team members. Through our activities, we also got one of our team members recruited into a full time job. We failed — until we got lucky.
It is easy to fail. We fail many times. Rejection is depressing. Work that we put in gets thrown out the window easily. But, every failure also helps us develop ourselves. By recognising our inadequacies, we can work on them to become better. Each failure brings us closer to success. Therefore, Failure is important.
So for 2018–19, with my limited capacity, my team presents to the student community — The opportunity to Fail. The theme for the year is — Fail as many times until you get lucky.
I believe that the greatest gift that any team can grant another is the gift of failure. To strive to build incredible things with amazing people, without the weight of failure demoralising them but rather encouraging them. To tell people that you are not going to fail alone. You have a team that will accept you no matter what a failure you are.
Having spent time at Consensys during my internship, I decided to take a leaf out of their book. The new organisation structure at King’s has a dual identity structure. Each member is firstly part of a subject-matter circle as represented by the triangle on the left— Legal or Business or Tech. This allows these people to have their internal communities to develop deeper expertise in their chosen area. Secondly, each member is also part of a project, which allow students to actively test their skills to develop products. Each of these projects have their own unique branding and character, giving them the potential to eventually scale into fully fledged businesses if the team desires. All teams will be made up of members from the three subject matter circles, because in our opinion, the law, business and technologists are the key ingredients of any endeavor. At the moment, we have three projects — Art-Tech, Business of Blockchain (our upcoming journalism platform) and our CryptoFund (currently in development).
But, the magic does not end there.
At KCL Blockchain, we believe that everyone can have a valuable idea and should be able to find people to build it with them. So, if someone wants to build something, they prepare a pitch deck and pitch it in front of the society at our weekly meetings. That is the pre-investment committee stage. Depending on the success of their pitch, the society can vote and decide on whether to allocate monetary and human resources to support these ideas.
And when they get bigger — we will bring them to the Investment Committee stage, where we invite our investment partners to consider their proposition and evaluate if they deserve greater funding.
To ensure that ideas can reach fruition, we have a core team that consolidates administrative tasks, like Finance and Events to enable our people to go forth and build. We recognise that blockchain is merely a vessel and to make it into a viable product, you need to load it with ‘goods’ from other disciplines and industries. So, we also offer weekly trainings to keep everyone abreast of blockchain develops in the respective subject matters and go beyond blockchain to educate our team about other essential knowledge such as market sizing, project management philosophies (agile/scrum), legal frameworks.
Running a venture studio in school is definitely going to be difficult, but I believe that with the current team, we are going to prove to the school community that we can offer more industry support than the Kings accelerator programme. To prove to ourselves that students can be there for each other. Sure, many of our ventures will fail but that is fine. We will lose money, and that is also fine. Because ultimately the more we fail, the closer we are to getting lucky.
The team is filled with astronauts, and the society is the mothership — we are going to a different place.
If you think you’re reading about a really weird student organisation — think again. We are the unicorn amongst the lambs in the school. Our organisation is different in that we do not have set committee roles. It is ever expandinh and multi-disiciplinary. Anyone can join us, and the more people we have in our teams, the better for us to develop. We are a talent-hungry organisation. Many people would have been rejected from big societies. I believe there should never be a bar to prevent good people from contributing to things they love. We should always find a way.
Conclusion
We are at the end of the article and I would have failed to keep many of my readers. That is fine. I am lucky that you read to the end. Thank you.
If you are keen to join us- send me a message and I shall offer you a ticket to join our mothership.
