Catching Up with the Ship that Sailed

That ship has sailed. I missed the bus. We all know that sinking feeling when we miss that Big Opportunity. So it’s kind of interesting to see two examples from the tech world of guys who went on to catch the ship that had sailed.

The first one is Kevin Systrom, an intern at the company that went on to become Twitter. After he left the internship. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he then went on to work for a bit more than a year at a travel-tip site, Nextstop. After he left, Nextstop was bought by Facebook. As Systrom thought back then:
“Great, I missed the Twitter boat. I missed the Facebook boat.”

Then Systrom went on to co-found a company that developed an app to apply filters on photos on your phone. The app became so popular on the iPhone that Facebook, wanting a piece of the mobile pie, and sensing that the focus was shifting from text to photos, bought Instagram for a whopping billion dollars. And that’s how Systrom caught up with his sailed ship!

The second instance was from a few decades earlier. Paul Lutus wrote a word processor called EasyWriter. Apple bought it from him for the small sum of $7,500! And then started selling EasyWriter like hotcakes. Poor Lutus hadn’t exactly missed the bus; but he sure had struck a poor deal. But it was too late. Or was it?

Soon enough, Apple wanted to develop version 2.0. Which is when they discovered that EasyWriter had been written in assembly code. That made it very hard for anyone else to edit the program. So Apple had to go back to Lutus. This time, Lutus was smarter and got a new contract based on royalties. And boy, did he mint money.

Sometimes in life, you do get a second chance. Or as in Systrom’s case, even a third chance. I guess the lesson is to keep trying.

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