Failure Friday: “I dropped out of Stanford and left my business…”

In 2012, Dr. Bryan Quoc Le walked 2,000 miles from Los Angeles to New Orleans. On the way, he noticed that everything revolved around food: the calories that kept him walking, the nutrients that kept his muscles strong. When he got home, he wanted to work with food. While couch surfing through Louisiana, he'd met someone who showed him you can make ice cream from one ingredient, frozen bananas. He wondered what it would take to stabilize and improve that recipe. A vegan banana ice cream on the market sounded great, and plant-based food was still scarce back then.

He bought ingredients, tested recipes on friends, and kept at it for about a month. Then he headed to Stanford for a dual graduate degree program in chemistry and medicine. The idea followed him there. He started selling ice cream to the med students in his program and reading research papers on ice cream and flavors. But his tiny dorm room was a poor place to make ice cream, and he couldn't scale the business while carrying a massive course load.

After a couple of months of dragging the project along, he was overwhelmed. He left both Stanford programs and shut down the ice cream business. From the outside, he says, it was the biggest business, professional, and academic failure of his life. He went home defeated and was depressed for nearly half a year.

But he used the time. He read books on personal development, entrepreneurship, and business, and he started learning about food science technology. That became the way back. Ten years later, he's where he wanted to be: supporting the plant-based food industry as an author, food scientist, and consultant. His lesson: “You can always hit rock bottom and always find a way to climb back up. Failure isn't forever.” Starting over is undervalued. Find Bryan at BryanQuocLe.com.