While leading Apple, co-founder Steve Jobs learned a thing or two about failure. Dismal sales of the Apple III and its follow-up -- a computer Jobs pushed for called LISA -- caused Apple to lose nearly half its market to rival IBM in the early 1980s.

"Sometimes the market, the people [and] the idea aren't right but you have to move on, [and] try again," Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell says of Jobs. Bushnell was a longtime mentor to Jobs. "If you lose a game of chess, you still set up the game and go at it again," he says.