Meet Ryan Grepper, the founder of The Coolest, a project that originated on a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. The Coolest is no normal cooler, as this “portable party” comes installed with a built-in blender, speakers, phone charger, and other fancy accessories. Grepper launched his campaign just four months ago, and since then, it has raised over 13 million dollars, breaking the record for the greatest amount raised on Kickstarter.

However, the impressive part is that The Coolest wasn’t successful the first time around. According to Entrepreneur, it had missed the $125,000 target in their 2012 campaign. Stories like these are typical of entrepreneurship. It is difficult to tell whether a startup will be well accepted by the market, and more often than not, it will be met by failure.

I think Grepper did a brilliant job overcoming failure. Instead of letting “game over” defeat him, his strong work ethic and ambitiousness propelled him to focus all his energy on The Coolest and develop an even better prototype (features like the phone charger weren’t in the first model). Grepper is a natural entrepreneur and is now remembered as one of the few successful solo-founder startups. His passion for the company coupled gave him the determination to turn a nifty homemade gadget into a million-dollar enterprise.