Traf-O-Data

Years before Microsoft was founded, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert started a company called Traf-O-Data. It was the early 1970’s and Bill Gates was just a teenager.

It took them about two whole years to build a working prototype. Traf-O-Data was a good idea but it had a flawed business model. In the end, Traf-O-Data's total net losses were about $20,000 (in today’s money).

That’s no small amount of money to lose. That’s not a small amount of time to invest. But here’s the thing, it pales in comparison to what Bill and Paul learned from the experience! And that experience was important for their future business adventures.

Most people talk about how they wish they could have invested in Google, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft in their early years. Let’s flip that on its head. How about you start investing in your own “early years”.

We don’t all have the opportunity to invest in such companies. But we do have the opportunity to invest in ourselves. We have the ability to read, discuss, experiment and even start companies of our own.

Many of those experiments will fail. But there’s no failure worse than failing to try. I’d rather build or try something and learn from its failure than live my life on autopilot.

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