In Brad Stone’s recent book The Upstarts, he recalls a key moment when AirBnB was applying to the famed startup accelerator, Y Combinator.

Applying a day late to the program, AirBnB’s chances were already slim. Their initial interview with Paul Graham, the Founder of Y Combinator, didn’t go so well either.

As the three AirBnB founders left the room, one of them handed Graham two cereal boxes of Obama O’s and Cap’n McCains — custom cereal boxes the AirBnB founders created and sold to pay the bills and keep the company alive, eliciting a surprising reply from Graham.

“Wow, you guys are like cockroaches… You just won’t die.”

According to Brad Stone, “Cockroach was Graham’s word for an unkillable startup that could weather any challenge”.

When I think back to my story in helping build Exact Media, and the prior companies we worked together on, I’m pretty confident in saying that we have some cockroach-like tendencies on our team.

We survived a poor business model in our first business together, multiple stop-and-start attempts at launching new ideas to keep the lights on, finally falling back on the one idea that made money to buy us time.

That idea turned into Exact Media — a business with 27 employees, operations in three countries, and much more room to grow.

When studying other individuals and businesses that continue to create long-term value, many of them exhibit extreme Cockroach-like tendencies.