The No Chronicles
30 /ENTREPRENEUR.COM/January-February 2018drew on his natural creativity
and resourcefulness. He’d
always thought he needed
funding to help recruit young
designers. But now he started
to get creative. He recruited
them right out of design
school—using student brand
ambassadors to get around
rules about recruiting on
campus. Soon he had a thou-
sand. Then he linked up with
London Fashion Week to do a
show for emerging designers.
He pitched a design competi-
tion, and that got him 3,000
more, along with a bunch of
press coverage.
Now he had inventory,
revenue, and exposure. He
was feeling good. One night,
over dinner, Sisakhti sent
a magazine piece to mega-
investor Tim Draper, who had
rejected him twice already.
Fifteen minutes later, Draper
responded, saying he wanted
to talk. Eureka.
“I think the reason he was
S
am Sisakhti had
an idea for an
e-commerce
company called
UsTrendy. It
would sell clothing
made by talented,
unknown fashion
designers from around the
world—acting as a marketplace
for great styles that could be
found nowhere else. It didn’t
matter that he had no experi-
ence in fashion or building a
brand. It didn’t matter that he
had just quit his first job out
of college after only four days.
What mattered was that he
believed that this idea could be
huge. And to get it there, he fig-
ured, he needed to raise money.
A lot of money.
Initially, it seemed easy. On
their very first pitch, Sisakhti
and his associate landed a
$500,000 offer. “Crazy,” he
says. But there was a catch:
The VC required them to move
to Silicon Valley to receive the
money. Sisakhti’s right-hand
man didn’t want to move.
Sisakhti decided he’d just go
do it himself.
So he moved, failing to
understand that investors buy
into a team, not just an idea.
He promptly lost the funding.
No matter,he thought. He’d
just go get more money.
Thus began Sisakhti’s real
journey. He started pitching
anyone and everyone, regard-
less of their field of expertise.
It went badly. By his count,
he was rejected around 150
times in a row over 18 months.
Worse, he kept revising his
business plan based on their
feedback, reducing it to an
ever-changing muddle that
made it even harder to sell.
This beating culminated
with a meeting with a VC who,
humiliatingly, was a family
friend. “He threw my business
plan in the trash, right in front
of me,” Sisakhti says. “And I
just remember thinking,Man,
what am I doing?”
Entrepreneurs hear a lot of
noes. In fact, it’s probably the
word they hear more than any
other, especially starting out. It
can come in torrents. It can get
crushing. The key, as Sisakhti
learned, is twofold: to survive
it, and to learn from it.
And here’s what Sisakhti
realized: He needed to stop
pitching. Not every business
needs funding, nor is every
business ready for funding.
“I was spending all my time
pitching, and I wasn’t spending
any time building the business,”
he says. So he scaled back. “I
went from wanting to create
the next Amazon to just saying
I wanted to grow a business
organically,” he recalls. “I just
wanted to pay for a modest,
middle-class lifestyle.”
Freed from the ceaseless
need to fund-raise, Sisakhti
interested was that I’d shown
I was going to do this with or
without the money,” Sisakhti
says. He even got a little cocky.
“I told him that it’s just a
matter of time: ‘If I have your
money, I’ll get there faster, but
if I don’t, I’ll still get there. And
then the valuation’s just gonna
be that much higher to get in.’ ”
Draper invested $1 million
in a first round, then came
back for a second round. In
total, UsTrendy has raised
more millions since, grown by
300 percent annually in its first
few years, and has worked with
more than 20,000 designers
from more than 100 countries.
It has attracted more than
two million followers on social
media and other digital
media channels.
Now when Sisakhti reflects
on all those noes, he thinks
not of rejection—but of how it
changed him. How it showed
him the way.
“It was awesome,” he says.
How to Survive
150 Straight
Rejections
And come away smarter, tougher, and more successful.
by JOE KEOHANE
Illustration / ISRAEL G. VARGAS