🎙️ The Beautiful Catastrophe: Lessons from Failing Forward with Dave Gandy

What if failure wasn’t the end — but the beginning of something awesome?

In this introspective and surprisingly funny episode of Podcast Awesome, host Matt Johnson sits down with Font Awesome founder Dave Gandy to get real about the stumbles, scrapes, and hard-earned wisdom that came from flunking out of MIT — twice. Yep, twice.

From crashing through academia to launching one of the most successful tech Kickstarters of all time, Dave opens up about the not-so-straight path to building something meaningful, and the strange truth that sometimes... believing the lie is part of what makes it real.

This one’s a goldmine for startup dreamers, believers in second (and third) chances, and anyone who’s failed their way into something better.

🔹 What We Cover in This Episode

• 🎓 Dave’s two-time flunk from MIT and what it taught him
• 🔄 How failure can be rebranded as feedback
• 🚀 Behind-the-scenes chaos (and hope!) of the Font Awesome 5 Kickstarter
• 🔮 The psychology of self-fulfilling prophecies
• 🤝 Finding the right co-founders and learning to trust again
• 🧠 Why doing hard things is the ultimate learning machine

⏱️ Timestamps

• 00:04:54 Failure is not final.
• 00:07:30 Embrace reality and grow.
• 00:10:06 Failure is an opportunity for growth.
• 00:18:56 Nothing is ever truly failure.
• 00:23:25 Find trustworthy partners for success.
• 00:27:05 Trust your teammates.
• 00:29:09 Try hard things and learn.

🎙️ Noteworthy Quotes from Dave Gandy on Failure, Reality, and Resilience

• "A startup is nothing more than believing a lie long enough that it becomes the truth."
• "Failure is really nothing more than reality attempting to introduce itself to us."
• "Most companies don’t ever recognize that this will almost certainly not be the last place you ever work. Climbing somebody else’s ladder is always a form of failure."
• "The only real failure is giving up, giving in… not making a conscious choice."
• "Nothing is ever failure if you’ve done it the right way — the way you think is right and healthy."
• "If we're only ever succeeding in life, that means we're never trying anything hard enough that truly challenges us."
• "Humility is one of the things we look for most in people we hire."
• "I can always come up with a reason why something is somebody else's fault. That’s why humility is such a key component."
• "Try hard things and find the right person to do them alongside."
• "There are two kinds of successful failures: choosing to stop because it’s wise, and choosing to go on because it’s wise. The only truly awful one is stopping without making the choice."

📎 Links & Resources

• Y Combinator
• MIT
• Make Some People Want: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Font Awesome's 2017 Kickstarter
• The Font Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin
• Audio mastering by Chris Enns at Lemon Productions

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