I love real business stories, the kind that embrace uncertainty, risk, and the struggle to push through difficulties. Not long ago, I came across a lesser-known chapter of Samsung’s early history. Before it became a global tech giant, Samsung was a grocery business in 1930s Korea, selling dried fish and noodles.
Between its humble beginnings as a grocery business and the release of the Galaxy S24 Ultra, Samsung came close to quitting the phone industry altogether. That fact shifted how I think about brands, especially the ones that look unstoppable today.
Success isn’t always linear. Sometimes, it’s chaotic, and often, the biggest breakthroughs happen right after you think about walking away. That’s the real lesson here, not just that Samsung eventually succeeded, but how close it came to failure, and why it chose to keep going.
Samsung Destroyed $50 Million Worth of Phones
In 1995, Samsung’s chairman Lee Kun-hee staged a literal funeral for his company’s mobile division. He ordered 150,000 defective phones to be stacked, destroyed, and set on fire in front of 2,000 employees. This wasn’t a PR move but a moment of reckoning.
At the time, Samsung was struggling to compete with Motorola and Nokia. Their phones were poorly built, the global market was not taking them seriously, and inside the company, teams were fragmented with no clear product vision.
Samsung faced two choices: quietly leave the phone business or rebuild from the ground up. They chose to stay, although this wasn’t a snap decision. The company’s leadership had to restructure the company, prioritise design, bring in new expertise, and, most critically, shift to a long-term mindset.
The Second Chance Wasn’t Instant, But Intentional
It took nearly a decade before the world began to recognise Samsung’s turnaround. The shift became visible in the early 2000s with the launch of sleek slider phones like the SGH-D500 and the Ultra Edition series. They weren’t iPhones, but they proved that Samsung could design high-quality, desirable devices.
Then came the iPhone in 2007. It could’ve crushed Samsung’s momentum, but instead, they doubled down. By 2010, they launched the first Galaxy S, setting the stage for the smartphone rivalry we know today.
But the real turning point wasn’t in 2010. It was fifteen years earlier, in 1995, when Samsung stood at a crossroads and chose to keep going. What stays with me most is that choice: the decision to persist long before there were any guarantees of success.
Second Chances Are Strategy, Not Luck
In business, comebacks don’t happen because people believe in fairy tales. They happen because companies make hard, deliberate decisions long before the market gives them credit.
Netflix didn’t succeed just by shifting from DVDs to streaming. It built the systems, gathered the data, and had the discipline to move before others saw the wave coming.
The same goes for AMD. It spent years behind Intel. But instead of folding, it doubled down on efficient, high-performance chips; now found in everything from gaming laptops to cloud servers.
These aren’t lucky breaks. They’re stories of tough decisions and long-game discipline. A second chance isn’t about hope. It’s about having the guts and precision to rebuild before anyone claps.
What Samsung’s Story Taught Me
As someone who has spent years working with remote teams, building tech products, and supporting startups, I’ve seen the same thing: a new app launches, and no one uses it. A growth plan is rolled out, and nothing grows. A team starts strong but ends up confused and stuck. It’s frustrating and it makes you want to quit.
But quitting isn’t always the right move. It’s to pause, look closely at what went wrong, and try again with a better plan. That’s what Samsung did. They didn’t keep going because they were sure it would work. They kept going because they believed it was worth trying one more time. I think that’s something we all need to remember, especially for founders or anyone stuck between “this isn’t working” and “maybe we should try one more time.”
So here’s my question to you: What have you almost given up on, not because it’s a dead end, but because the first version didn’t work? Maybe you don’t need to give up. Maybe all you need is a reset, and your own “Galaxy S” moment could be just ahead.