From the ashes to success Kathryn Minshew

   Kathryn Minshew, CEO and co-founder of New York-based The Muse, which is the only online career resource that offers a behind the scenes look at job opportunities with hundreds of companies. Kathryn quit her job at the Clinton Health Access Initiative to run Pretty Young Professionals (PYP), working as an unpaid CEO and editor in Chief. In the spring of 2011 she  had managed to get the attention of 9,000 users. Then, a redesign increased users to 20,000, and the other members of the founding team began to get more involved.
    Kathryn and her co-workers broke apart after an argument about who should take charge of the company. Kathryn stated that she and her co-workers divided their equity on a piece of paper without consulting a lawyer as they felt that they did not need one. She was at a standstill for three weeks trying to figure out if she should fight for the existing company or strike out and do it over.
   Minshew did  a do-over on PYP. In September 2011, she launched The Daily Muse (now called The Muse). "It was painful, but being forced to start over was a unique sort of gift, because having been through a lot together, the team comes out of it with the confidence that nothing is going to stop us." Minshew says. After being accepted  into the prestigious Y Combinator program in November, she added mobile, local and social media functionality to her platform to look more like a "billion-dollar" startup.
   At the end of 2012 the Muse website had nearly 2 million users in more than 160 countries, increasing at a rate of 30 percent every month. The Muse, now has partnerships with 60-plus companies, including Intel, Sephora, NPR, Pinterest, Twitter and foursquare.

Reference: Wang. J. 23rd January, 2013. How 5 Successful Entrepreneurs Bounced Back After Failure. Retrieved from: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/225204