Failure #1: Joined a mobile app startup as employee #3 for a lot less money than I should have, run by a guy who really didn't know how to run a startup, he had just convinced the parent company to give him some money to make mobile apps. He couldn't raise money, only get handouts from the board. I falsely assumed because those people were rich as hell and the other companies they owned were successful that we'd be okay also. But they didn't want to spend hardly any money, especially on marketing, and when our apps failed to make money, it just convinced the board to pull the plug on us.<p>Which lead to Failure #2: The startup guy decided to make a couple apps as 'warmups' before his main app idea. When those apps were released and didn't make money, the board became more wary about letting us do the 'main' app. If we had just started with the main app to begin with, they wouldn't have seen those app failures and we could have probably convinced them to keep funding it until release and that app might have actually seen success. Having low-investment but visible failures made the company look like a failure, and insured its death.<p>But not a failure: I had a lot of autonomy, I had my first experience managing other employees, and the apps we worked on helped me learn a ton in a short amount of time, and I'm still proud of them years later, even if they didn't reach much of an audience. That experience also helped me land my next job.<p>I could probably do that about every job in my career, honestly. Pretty much every job I've had was a mistake and a valuable learning experience at the same time, at least up to a certain point. Before this job I had joined another startup as employee #3 that failed for different reasons, and after this job I joined a small company that ended up having its worse year ever and lost all of their clients, and then I took a contract job I despised just to keep afloat for awhile where the entire department fell apart when the lead dev left and they terminated my contract, but that gave me the skills that helped me get my current job I've been at for 3 and a half years which started so successful it was bought by a larger company, and has been very slowly eviscerated by that larger company as it has been forcibly integrated into the rest of its corporation (our company, now division, has about 15% of the workforce it had when it was purchased, and it had over 500 employees a the time), and yet I've learned a lot while I've been here and worked on projects for the most highest profile clients in my life (you can't get higher profile than them, really) and for the first time I've actually had to really, really care about optimization since our traffic is massive and constant, although the stress has gotten beyond ridiculous now and I need to leave soon.