AliBaba

Jack Ma, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, went through a lot of rejection before he was the richest person in China. He was rejected from Harvard 10 times. No banks would work with him, so Ma decided to start his own payment program called Alipay that is used today by over 1 billion people.

Amazon

"Every well-intentioned, high-judgment person we asked told us not to do it," says Jeff Bezoz, the founder of Amazon.com.

Beatles

The then Director of Decca Records turned down the Beatles. He said to their promoter, 'We don't like your boys' sound. Groups of guitarists are on the way out.'

Charles Schwab

In early 1990s, the leaders of Merrill Lynch, the then largest financial services company, believed that e-commerce was jus a hype. In contrast, Charles R. Schwab, the founder of the then tiny brokerage firm Charles Schwab, believed that online trading was going to become huge.
Charles Schwab pioneered seamless stock trading on Internet in 1996 and went from a tiny firm to the world's largest financial services company. On January 1, 2000 the market capitalization of Charles Schwab surpassed that of Merrill Lynch, and Schwab became the world's largest financial services company.  >>>

Dell

According to Michael Dell, leading industry analysts we two-zeros wrong when they tried to forecast next-year capitalization of his young firm.

Harry Potter

Various major publishers tuned down the first Harry Potter novel.

Panasonic

Konosuke Matsushita began the Panasonic’s journey by inventing a two-socket light fixture. The invention was rejected by his employer, so Matsushita left the company and founded the Panasonic Corporation.

WalMart

Here is an advice by Sam Walton, the founder of WalMart. "Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long,"

Xerox

IBM rejected the photo-copying idea that launched Xerox.