A fail resume is, as its name suggests, a list of rejections and setbacks.

This concept originated in academia, but can be applied to improve one’s career, resilience, and approach to challenges in any walk of life.

I’ve organized my setbacks by year (starting with 2016), and what constitutes a “failure” (or fail) here is based solely on my own judgement. It’s important to not only list the failures, but also learn from them, so I will add reflections to some of them (in progress).

2021¶

Never heard back from Forethought.ai, Coinbase. Had applied via the cold form on their websites.
Rejected by Flowrite because they could not afford me
Ghosted by XFlowPay in mid-August
Ghosted by Google Recruiter in July

2020¶

Rejected by UMass, UW, CMU Language Technolog, UCB MIMS, and bunch of other Grad school programs because of a bad recco
Lesson Learnt: Never trust an American
Sahil, the Product Manager and Verloop and Piyush, the CTO at Verloop quit -- atleast in part because I think I overwhelmed them
Got cold-rejected by someone I thought it'd work out with romantically

2019¶

Spent 6 weeks prototyping a solution at Verloop.io which doesn't break even on cost
Lesson Learnt: In Enterprise SaaS, never write any code before someone tells you what they are willing to pay for that
Tried to get better at DevOps, but ultimately could not because of lack of discipline

2018¶

Did not even get interview callbacks from my favourite NLP Company at the time: Rasa
Had to quit Soroco because of lack of opportunities to grow internally. Really loved the crew, which was smart but not agile or humble
Did not even apply to GoJek, Linkedin and Swiggy's kickass Data Science teams
Lesson learnt: Be proactive. Take moonshots. Setting an upper-cap on your ambitions is kinda stupid

2017¶

Samsung: Filed for two patents -- which despite being selected, eventually never materialised

2016¶

Did not even clear Amazon's first programming round on campus

Inspired from Katherine Huang's Fail Resume