Fargo native Abdur Chowdhury fails every day, he says. Every day.

His track record certainly looks good, for that matter: former Chief Scientist at Twitter, former Chief Architect of AOL, co-founder of the Alta Vista School, current CEO of a startup building digital framing called Pushd.

But each of the successes comes from a road littered with scrapped ideas, he said. His current project has gone through at least eight. (They finally landed on a digital frame that can pull photos directly from your phone and display in your house.)

“I can’t think of any entrepreneur who doesn’t fail every day” Abdur said in a phone interview, speaking from his home in San Francisco.

“You have to be okay with failure. It’s not going to work the first time, not the second time, not the third time. You just gotta wake up every day and say what’s working, and what isn’t working, and how do I evolve and adapt with what I now know,” he said.

The Process of Adaptation

This is the process of adaptation, one Abdur sees as crucial to progress.

Look at farmers, Abdur says. He knows farmers; his early childhood was spent about 67 miles from Fargo, on farmland in Colfax and Barney. His parents met at North Dakota State University. They moved when he was five, but he came back every summer.

“The farmers in North Dakota are more efficient than anyone else in the world,” he said. “It’s not trade secret, they just work at it.”

He traces his own journey of adapting back to his time as a professor at Georgetown University. He taught in the computer science department for many years, until a question began to pester him. It’s a question that still comes to mind whenever he visits Fargo, he said.

“I come and stand in the mall, or the Wal-Mart, and I always ask – how is what I’m working on important to these people?” he said. “It’s the question that grilled me out of academia. I realized, I could write this paper about this crazy algorithm. Maybe someone will eventually use it. But this is not making a meaningful impact in people’s lives. Life is mostly simple.”

Adaptation 1: Summize & Twitter

This new drive lead him to leave education and co-found Summize, a search engine that provides listings of most reviewed and liked products. In 2008 Summize merged “with a startup called Twitter,” Abdur said – a company which, at the time, employed 12 engineers and was in sore need of a business plan.

As Twitter’s Chief Scientist, Abdur established the Twitter search, recommendations and trend features, while watching the Twitter-sphere expand. When he left three years later, during the mass exodus of the OG Twitter crew in 2011, there were around 950 employees, he said.

Adaptation 2: Be a Dad, Start a school

He adapted, too, to become a husband, and a father to a little girl. And when it came time for his daughter to enter the education system, Abdur, unimpressed with what California had to offer, adapted to become a school director as well.

“There’s three things you can do when you see a problem,” he said. “Ignore it, complain about it, or fix it.”

Abdur is the founder of the Alta Vista school, a K-8 private school with a focus on experience-based learning and teaching technology. The San Francisco school now has 220 kids and employs 47 faculty, with a 5:1 student to teacher ratio, Abdur said.

The school allows him to teach the necessity of failing and adapting at an early age, he said. He uses it to fight what he sees as the “illiteracy of the future”: the inability to keep on learning.

“Have you ever heard of the Paper Clip Test?” he asks me over the phone. I hadn’t.

“It’s where you give a paper clip to a kindergartner, and ask them what it is,” he said. “And it’s a spaceship, a lazer, a dog. Give it to a 3^rd grader and it’s 20 things. By high school, it’s a paper clip. What happened? Did we kill the creativity?”

“Education should be pushing the other way,” he went on. “We shouldn’t be going backwards. If we’re not going to start out day one teaching critical thinking, and keep students still loving to learn, then we’ve failed at education.”

Adaptation 3: Build Personalized Submarines

Some adaptations are sacrificial, like Abdur giving up cave diving at his wife’s request (it’s dangerous.) Now he gets his fix from what he calls his favorite investment project, a company called DeepFlight that is making personalized submarines.

“Three-fourths of the planet is underwater,” he said. At DeepFlight, they’re building what’s called positively buoyant submarines, “so that more and more people can explore the world’s oceans.”

They expect to have their first subs at resorts by the end of the year, Abdur said.

Adaptation 4: Throw Spaghetti

Meanwhile, he and the team at Pushd Inc. continue to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, so to speak. The digital frame idea, which emerged from a frustration at having to print and frame photos, is the latest venture. But of course, Abdur said, this has not stopped the constant questioning.

“Question everything,” he said. “Have hard debates internally. I want our biggest critics to be in here, questioning every one of the things we have.”

Abdur equates starting a company to pushing a boulder uphill. One must reconcile with the fact that failure is inevitable, he said. The key to success – at his school, in his startups, in his personal life – is having the tenacity to adapt, he said.

“I talk to these new startups and they pitch you a new idea. Yeah yeah, whatever. You made up every number. All your assumptions are wrong. Whatever you’re doing today is wrong,” he said. “You will evolve and change. You either believe you will evolve, and you change… or you don’t.”

Perhaps, it’s like the submarines. Abdur explained, in rudimentary terms, how the physics work: how it’s like an airplane, where the lower pressure on top of the wing and high pressure on bottom pushes up the plane. If you flip that upside down, you have the positively buoyant submarine.

“If everything fails,” he said. “It floats back up.”

Abdur will be returning to Fargo on March 6, 2016, as the keynote presenter for Startup Weekend Fargo. Everyone is invited to hear him share more about failure, success and submarines. Join us at 4:30 PM at the Fargo Theater for the free event.

Photos courtesy of Abdur Chowdhury.