Accepting and Learning from Failure - Karam Kanwar

My name is Karam Kanwar, & I’m a final-year student at UBC Sauder, passionate about strategy, startups, and storytelling. Over the past few years, I’ve co-founded organizations, worked in consulting, and—most importantly—learned to embrace failure.

In university, failure is often treated like something shameful. We talk about success—internship offers, case competition wins, startup launches—but we rarely talk about the rejections, the projects that went nowhere, the ideas that fizzled out. And yet, as I look back on my undergrad journey, it’s clear: the best things that happened to me didn’t come in spite of failure—they happened because of it.

In my second year, I had this idea: I wanted to interview entrepreneurs and share their stories on social media. I thought it would be inspiring, maybe even go viral. But it failed. I didn’t create value for the people I interviewed, had no distribution plan, and was working alone. It flopped. At the time, it felt like a waste of time. But that failure taught me something vital: community matters. Great ideas don’t thrive in isolation. That lesson led me to co-found UBC Startups, which became a vibrant community of 600+ students, founders, and investors. It worked because it wasn’t about me—it was about building something bigger than myself.

A year later, I landed a summer internship at a startup and was thrilled to get started. But once I joined, I realized they didn’t really have work for me. For weeks, I waited for meaningful tasks, tried to contribute, and felt increasingly lost. Eventually, I made the difficult decision to leave. I thought I had failed again. But with that unexpected free time, I co-founded Organic Growth Digital, a consulting service for startups and nonprofits. That summer turned out to be one of the most entrepreneurial periods of my life. I got to help a fintech raise $500K, and develop a social impact bond for a non-profit organization. What looked like a missed opportunity was actually a turning point.

Even in my final year, the failures didn’t stop. I faced a seemingly endless string of interview rejections. However, I would always try to understand why I got rejected and go back to the drawing board. Eventually, I got one “yes” from Accenture Strategy. And it turned out to be the most transformative experience of my career so far—teaching me more about problem-solving, collaboration, and leadership than any classroom ever could.

To conclude, failure often signals you’re on the edge of something better. Every failure gave me space to reflect, to build, to try again. And each one taught me something about humility, resilience, patience, and trusting the process.

To other students reading this: don’t let failure scare you. Don’t waste your time pretending it doesn’t happen. Instead, let it teach you. Learn how to take the L gracefully, how to ask for feedback, how to pivot. Learn how to keep going even when it feels like everyone else is sprinting ahead.

Because the truth is, failure doesn’t close doors—it opens new ones. You just have to be brave enough to walk through them.

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Hey! My name is Karam Kanwar, and I am a final-year finance student at UBC Sauder. 

I have a background working with startups, consulting firms, tech companies, and non-profits, and I enjoy working across industries and disciplines. Most recently, I was employed by a software company, where I got to design and implement internal scalable systems. 

Feel free to connect with me to learn about my past experiences. Happy to chat!