Failure is an option

I am popping out in a little while to go talk to a bunch of international students about Silicon Valley, about start-ups.  It’s the second opportunity in a few days for me to think a bit about students and Silicon Valley.

In the early years of the decade I ran a program with a former college professor of mine called the White Rose Entrepreneurship Program.  We brought undergraduates studying science or engineering out to Silicon Valley during the summer break prior to their last year of studies.  They were put into ten-week placements at a bunch of companies, at first ones I knew personally, later with the assistance of 3i and one of the folks from Garage Technology Ventures.  The aim of the program was to expose UK undergrads to the unique culture of Silicon Valley in the hope that one or two of them might go down the startup path.  (One graduate of the program will be joining us at AppWhirl shortly, so I consider that a win right there!)



I bumped into one of the 3iers involved a couple of nights ago, and in his new life we’re thinking of having his present firm help sponsor a re-start of the WREP, which would be great.

That conversation, along with this talk I’m giving today, made me go back and remind myself of what are the major differences between the culture in most countries overseas, and the culture in Silicon Valley, that makes the latter so much more attractive to entrepreneurs and lets them succeed.  Like a Robert Zemeckis film I have already, of course, given away the entire plot in the trailer (why does he do that - it ruins the movies?).  One of the major differences is failure.

Mark Suster has written a couple of times about how, from a VC perspective he likes to go against conventional wisdom (back first timers) and prefers to back second time entrepreneurs who have their first failure under their belt  (recent article here).  I think it’s a smart strategy - I’d like to think I hold that opinion for objective reasons as well as my self-interested ones.

It remains the case that in most other cultures if you try and fail you are, by definition a failure.  You don’t really get another crack at it.  Conversely I was talking with one of the two seed investors from my previous attempt to get a start-up off the ground and he wanted me to give him the AppWhirl pitch.  Automatically without thinking I reminded him I’d lost a chunk of his money last time around to which he replied: “we’ve invested again in people who have lost money for us two or three times, if we believe in the person and the opportunity”.  For reasons not relevant here AppWhirl probably won’t going use that source for financing this round as it’s not the right fit for us, but it was a great reminder of why Silicon Valley is great.  It accepts that startups fail.

Because smart people learn from failure.

This isn’t the blog posting for a post-mortem of my last startup - that can come later.  But we did make a lot of mistakes.  We committed the cardinal sin of bringing in a technical co-founder to lead engineering without doing enough due diligence on him and that turned out to be a disaster.  We tried to ramp too soon and wasted money on unproductive sales people.  An even more important learning points was that we accepted a round of financing for much less than we’d asked for, and therefore less than we needed to get to the next milestones - would have been better to have said no and kept looking.  (Raise the right amount at the right time from the right people!)  It was hard.  Painful.  But it was a valuable learning experience.

For the true entrepreneur Silicon Valley is still the best place in the world to be.  Work hard.  Make smart decisions.  Pour your energy and passion into your vision and do everything you can to make it a reality.  However sometimes it won’t work.  Be determined but remember that the Nietzschean “will-to-power” thing of just saying Failure Is Not An Option doesn’t work in the real world.  Failure is an option - not an option you choose but an option that sometimes just happens to dash your dream.

But creative people will always have more dreams.