The Rejection Files

Every great founder has a file. This is what's inside.

Jack Ma was one of 24 people who applied for a job at KFC, and he says he was the only one turned down. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw qualified as a master brewer and was turned down by brewery after brewery in India because she was a woman.

Richard Liu's first business, a small restaurant, went bankrupt while he was still a student. Uday Kotak's cricket career ended at twenty when a ball hit him on the head. They went on to build Alibaba, Biocon, JD.com and Kotak Mahindra Bank.

The Rejection Files tells the true stories of 20 of Asia's greatest founders, from China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong. It covers how they started, the no's they got along the way, and what they did next.

A different way to tell a success story

Most business biographies are told by the founder, or by a fan. This book is told by the one character who was there at every low point: Rejection.

Rejection is a fictional narrator, a tired, slightly bitter official who has spent a lifetime turning people down. In each file he explains why he said no, what he expected to happen, and how the person proved him wrong (or, sometimes, proved him right).

Over twenty files, he slowly starts to wonder whether he understands his own job. The narrator is invented. Everything else is not. Every fact, figure and date comes from published sources, every quote is a real one, and stories a founder has told about himself are flagged as his own account.

Inside the files

• Jack Ma (Alibaba), Ren Zhengfei (Huawei), Zhang Yiming (ByteDance and TikTok), Pony Ma (Tencent), Li Shufu (Geely), Richard Liu (JD.com) and Changpeng Zhao (Binance)
• Masayoshi Son (SoftBank), Tadashi Yanai (Uniqlo) and Hiroshi Mikitani (Rakuten)
• Narayana Murthy (Infosys), Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Biocon), Uday Kotak (Kotak Mahindra Bank) and Sridhar Vembu (Zoho)
• Li Ka-shing, Anthony Tan (Grab), Forrest Li (Sea and Shopee), Tony Fernandes (AirAsia), Kwon Hyuk-bin (Smilegate) and Dhanin Chearavanont (CP Group)

• Anyone who has just been turned down for a job, a loan, a school or an idea
• Founders and would-be entrepreneurs who want real stories, not slogans
• Readers curious about how Asia's biggest companies actually began
• Teens and adults who like their business history told like a story