Fahim Ferdous on why rejection is how conviction gets built

What this conversation is about

Fahim Ferdous co-founded AdQuick, which took one of the oldest corners of advertising, billboards, transit and everything people pass on the way to work, and made it something a brand can plan, buy and measure the way it buys advertising online. Glenn Llopis invited him onto the Earning Conviction series because of how their first conversation went. Glenn told him that people today are not worn out from working too much:

"They’re exhausted because they’re pretending too much" — Glenn Llopis

Ferdous came straight back with his own version: stop the acting and go solve real problems. Glenn’s read on him is that he never had to recover his identity, because he never gave it away.

The first no

At nine, Ferdous picked up a coding book. The relatives around him told him it was too advanced and asked what he was doing. That, he says, was the first chip placed on his shoulder. By eleven he was so absorbed that his parents unplugged the internet at night, so he saved up for a longer cable and kept going. At sixteen, when teachers asked what he was doing with his life and he said he was building a company, he realized nobody was going to get it, and that he would have to believe in himself.

Glenn asked whether that was lonely. In the moment it was fuel, Ferdous says; the loneliness came later. What carried him was not only proving people wrong:

"The joy of the craft carried me through the no’s." — Fahim Ferdous

Coding was his basketball. Even if he never reached the majors, he loved shooting the ball, and it happened to become a very valuable skill. Later, as founders, he and his partners manufactured the drive on purpose:

"we would actually put it up on the wall with the rejection reason to manufacture that chip on the shoulder." — Fahim Ferdous

Talking yourself out of it

The idea for AdQuick began as a joke. He tried to buy a taxi ad to tease a friend and could not get the seller to answer the phone. That sent him into company filings and competitors, and years of floating the idea past bosses and peers. At Instacart he met the colleague who would become his co-founder, who had the same problem at corporate scale: a fast-growing company with money to spend that could not buy billboards easily.

Even so, they talked themselves out of it more than once. Instacart was comfortable and growing; nobody new had entered the industry in years; leaving felt unsafe. The company started a year later than it could have. He does not regret the delay:

"I think that time I spent not doing it and telling myself no was a time I developed conviction on the idea" — Fahim Ferdous

His advice to anyone stuck in the same loop is to gather feedback widely and then decide:

"follow your gut. Take a calculated risk." — Fahim Ferdous

Your risk profile may differ if you have a family to support, he adds, but the question you keep asking yourself should not be ignored:

"Don’t bury it deep. Don’t forget about it" — Fahim Ferdous

Where he hid

Ferdous told Glenn something most executives would not say on air: for years he hid behind engineering and never built the sales and marketing muscle, because talking to customers meant hearing no. The line at the top of this page is what that cost him. The lesson he took is to stay close to other people, customers, salespeople, investors, product managers, and put yourself out there.

Investors said no for five months. The first to believe in them, he says, was someone who had tried to buy the same kind of ad and failed:

"all you really need is someone who really felt that pain acutely as well to believe in you." — Fahim Ferdous

His biggest lesson for building a company follows from that. You need to be rejected at a high rate: in sales, in hiring, in fundraising and in your own ideas, because:

"rejection is part of the drive to conviction" — Fahim Ferdous

Glenn pressed him on the people who did everything right, the good school, the safe path, the money, and found no joy. Ferdous says he has lived that too, for months at a time, whenever he suppressed what he knew was right. His advice is practical:

"look into what’s annoying you and listen to it." — Fahim Ferdous

For people who feel stuck, he suggests using evenings and weekends to build something they love, and not dismissing it as only a hobby. Toys become businesses.

Keep moving

Glenn asked what he would tell a younger version of himself, and what he would tell the generation now trying to claim its own identity while older people try to reclaim theirs. His answer is to keep having agency and keep moving, at nine, sixteen or forty-six:

"action produces information" — Fahim Ferdous

"effort is attractive no matter how old you are" — Fahim Ferdous

He keeps a rule with a friend, a little bit every day, even twenty minutes:

"you could go far just by doing a little bit every day." — Fahim Ferdous

His advice to chief executives running an old playbook is to accept that nothing improves on its own:

"the default state of the world is that the world doesn’t change until you change it" — Fahim Ferdous

So you put a smile on your face and push. Glenn heard in that the answer to why so many transformations stall:

"transformation fails when we fail to allow people to keep going." — Glenn Llopis