Founders@Fail

Santa Claus & Tonight's Founders@Fail

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:04:00 -0400

When I was a kid, I was a total pain in the butt. Weeks before Christmas, I had already secreted out every carefully hidden present, delicately unwrapped, and then re-wrapped them because I could not stand the anticipation. I hate surprises and spent most of my free time watching McGuyver, so go figure…so, with that, I’ll give you a teaser for what’s in store tonight-

Surprise #1:

Get to GA early tonight. Tonight’s about YOU, our members. Before we kick off tonight’s interview with Ted Morgan, I’m giving you the mike. This is your chance to share your own stories. Our members are in the trenches every day struggling to build their startups and deserve to be heard…

Surprise #2

A little incentive to come up with your best story: winners will receive all-access passes to MIT’s T=0 Conference. Come hear Brad Feld, Mitch Kapor, and oh yeah, Founders@Fail discussing best practices.

I’ll see you TONIGHT!

Reminder to attend you MUST RSVP: http://tedmorganatfailga.eventbrite.com/

A meditation on the cuteness of small children

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 02:28:48 -0400

People always think babies are cuter than they really are, especially their own. They overlook the farting and crying while everyone else feigns interest in little Johny’s latest earth shattering progress.

Well my baby, Founders@Fail, just celebrated it’s first birthday and I’ll be damned if it isn’t the cutest thing since cherry pie. To celebrate, we’ve got a few surprises up our sleeves.

Oh, you thought I was going to tell you about them? Why would I call them surprises if I were going to do that…

To find out come to next Monday’s Founders@Fail with Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless.

When Google called Skyhook “a hungry startup [whose] accuracy is better than ours” Ted earned the sort of praise most startups can only dream of. And then he suffered the consequences…Under extreme pressure, Motorola yanked Skyhook’s contract to power geo-location services for its handsets and Skyhook became embroiled in a complicated anti-trust suit with the very folks whose praise he just enjoyed. Ted’s been through the wringer and then some. He has more war stories than a Robert Ludlum novel and he’ll be sharing a few of them with us…

WHERE:
General Assembly
902 Broadway
4th Floor

WHEN:
Monday, September 12th
7:00PM

To attend you MUST RSVP:http://tedmorganatfailga.eventbrite.com/

This ladies and gentlemen is exactly what the hell I’ve...

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:42:01 -0400

This ladies and gentlemen is exactly what the hell I’ve been talking about for the past year. If you can pick yourself up, bear down, and refuse to give up, you will find a way to accomplish your goals and live your dream. And if you dismiss this as some cliche, please go find a different blog to read.

Owe a big debt of gratitude for stumbling across this on Michael Lavalle’s blog: http://www.warandtheentrepreneur.com/

Sage advice since the days of red rover…

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:18:10 -0400

Sage advice since the days of red rover…

The Alamo and David Hasselhoff

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:54:48 -0400

Brad was preaching to the choir last night when he shared how he evaluates entrepreneurs’ past failures. He made a key distinction between the fact of failure and its underlying causes. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was: if you failed because you couldn’t build a credible product or made weak hiring choices, investors will judge you accordingly. However, if you executed well, but just never found the right market, there is no stigma from investors.

I’d like to add one more layer- even if you dropped the ball, made poor hiring choices, etc…anything short of obvious malfeasance or just plain stupidity is recoverable. If you are honest about the mistakes you made and thoughtful about the lessons learned, this is the country of Rocky, the Alamo, and David Hasselhoff. We give second, third, and fourth chances out like party favors…

So let’s hear your stories. Take a minute to write a paragraph about one of your failures and share them with fellow members by sending them to: foundersatfail[a t] gmail [d ot) com

The most compelling lesson learned will win TWO free tickets to our next meetup with James Altucher on June 13th.

REMINDER our next meetup is with: James Altucher (founder of Reset & StockPickr)

WHEN:

June 13th 6:30PM

WHERE:
General Assembly
902 Broadway
4th Floor

To RSVP you MUST purchase a ticket:

http://foundersatfail.eventbrite.com/

Failstradamus

Mon, 23 May 2011 11:07:03 -0400

In case you too survived Saturday’s Rapture, I thought I’d run a little contest…funniest missed calls in technology history. One lucky winner gets 3 FREE tickets to next week’s interview with Brad Burnham, founding partner of Union Square Ventures.

Submissions will undergo a rigorous analysis including snarf-induce-ability, milliseconds before retweeting, and my own bad judgement…

Here’s a little inspiration to get your creative juices flowing:

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” – HM Warner, Founder of Warner Bros, 1927

“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” — Dr Dionysys Larder (1793-1859), professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College London

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION:

Tweet to: foundersatfail using hashtag: #failstradamus

REMINDER: Brad Burnham, Union Square Ventures

WHEN: June 1^st, 6:30PM

WHERE: General Assembly (902 Broadway, 4^th Floor)

BUY TICKETS: http://foundersatfailbradburnham.eventbrite.com/

The Purpose Driven Failure

Sun, 08 May 2011 19:41:15 -0400

A little morning read got me thinking about why I started Founders @Fail…

http://bit.ly/mNeFtA…

Scott Gerber of Sizzle It! mentions in this article that “setbacks, though painful, will teach you more about business than any textbook, lecture, or mentor ever could” and he’s spot on. The stories and advice you hear at Founders @Fail are signposts. They act as warning signs to help you anticipate issues that will likely arise as your company emerges through growing pains. They aren’t however, the answer. There is, sadly, no right answer and there may not even be “right” questions to ask. The situations you’ll face and the approaches you develop to compensate are absolutely unique. These failures will be deeply personal and can’t be replicated or avoided entirely because you came to Founders @Fail or read an article on the topic. What we do is remind you that you’re not alone. Folks suffered messier, more humiliating failures than you, no matter how bad it feels. You’ll survive, even if your business won’t. That fact, in a strange way, can sometimes be incredibly cathartic and if you fight like hell, you’ll learn more about yourself through the process than you could have ever imagined. And that is worth it’s weight in gold…

Upcoming Founders @Fail

Mon, 02 May 2011 14:33:03 -0400

I have not one, but two upcoming Founders @Fail that I’m pretty stoked to announce…

JUNE 1st: Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures.

Brad is the real deal, a veteran VC who built one of the most respected firms in the business. He’s seen the rise of Silicon Alley from the very beginning, survived the hype of bubbles and backed some of the most innovative companies this town has seen.

RSVP:

http://foundersatfailbradburnham.eventbrite.com/

JUNE 13th: James Altucher of Reset and StockPickr

James caught my attention with one of the most brutally honest blog posts I’ve ever read (http://bit.ly/hBqDKi). He didn’t sugarcoat a thing. That’s a refreshing reminder that failure isn’t something you can wrap a pretty pink bow on and hand out like pearls of wisdom.

Surviving failure without resorting to rants and grudges is rare enough. It’s even more rare to survive with enough perspective and self-discipline to reflect on your mistakes and leverage the experience to start from scratch and claw your way back to success. James has that in spades. He is a serial entrepreneur, founding Reset and StockPickr. In his spare free time, he is also an author. How does he have time to juggle both careers? Well, the answer is in his latest book, How To Be The Luckiest Person Alive:

“You have no more free time. In your free time you are thinking of new ideas for customers, new ideas for services to offer, new products.”

James is offering a free PDF version to any attendees to this event. To get your copy, sign in at the event!

RSVP:

http://foundersatfail.eventbrite.com/

Last Night's Fail

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 07:04:00 -0400

Last night was awesome. Jon (Betterment) and John (ADstruc) dropped some serious knowledge on Founders @Fail. These guys deserve a lot of credit for not shying away from uncomfortable questions. They’re what make this community worthwhile.

Following up a thread we began last night- how do you know the difference between when it’s time to iterate and when it’s time to just pull the plug? Dharmesh Shah answers that question in a recent post:

“How do you know whether you’re stuck in a quagmire? Isn’t startup success often about persistence and focus? What if that break-out success is just around the corner. Those are good questions. The simple answer is: There are no simple answers. If it were me, the question I would ponder is this: If 90% of everything started going “right” with your startup, what will it become? (I’ll call this the “wave the magic wand”, best-case scenario). If the answer does not please you, and you’ve been at your current idea a reasonably long time, I’d ponder a change. “

He’s spot on- there are no hard and fast rules or easy answers. That’s what makes these challenges worthwhile. That being said, however, I think it’s important to balance the macro with the micro. Yes, you have to ponder the best case scenario. If you execute flawlessly and all the stars are aligned, but that still doesn’t rock your world, it’s time to move on. However, in the particular case, it’s also important to have the appropriate evaluation criteria. That starts by understanding what metrics are critical to defining success. That doesn’t have to be a traditional measurement such as time on site, click through, or revenue. It could be the number of comment responses or “likes.” Just make sure that whatever metric you measure is the right metric to understand if you are failing or succeeding. The history of business is littered with failures that succeeded wildly in measuring all the wrong things.

To read Dharmesh Shah’s full post:

http://bit.ly/gOqRVE

The Invention of Failure

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:09:20 -0400

I’ve got a special surprise at Monday’s meetup! I’ll be announcing a F@F first and kicking off a challenge to everybody in the room…things are about to get very interesting…

Don’t forget to RSVP:

http://bit.ly/gqEooa

In the mean time, an article by inventor, James Dyson reminded me of why we’re here. This is a man who managed to make vacuum cleaners sexy, a feat I almost consider more impressive than making a billion dollars along the way. In Wired, he describes the process, and let me tell you, there’s nothing trite or sexy about it. Hard work doesn’t begin to describe it. 15 years of constantly scraping by in the face of constant frustration and failure:

“It took 5,127 prototypes and 15 years to get it right. And, even then there was more work to be done. There are countless times an inventor can give up on an idea. By the time I made my 15th prototype, my third child was born. By 2,627, my wife and I were really counting our pennies. By 3,727, my wife was giving art lessons for some extra cash. These were tough times, but each failure brought me closer to solving the problem. It wasn’t the final prototype that made the struggle worth it. The process bore the fruit. I just kept at it…No one is going to get it right the first time. Instead of being punished for mistakes along the way, learn from them.”

Most of us don’t have the fortitude or self confidence to survive that sort of challenge. 15 years is half my life. I barely spend 15 minutes on something before I start to get antsy. It’s a humbling reminder of what it really takes to succeed. It’s also an important reminder that we must define our own success. Counting pennies isn’t the sort of thing our society typically praises. We like big cars and flashy watches. We like titans of industries and fancy degrees from famous schools. There was a time when America even begrudgingly respected good ol’ fashioned hard work, but that message has been drowned out by the constant hype of super charged startups, Wall St excess, and self help books from the likes of Donald Trump. If James Dyson had derived his self respect from how society defines success, I doubt we’d be reading his article in Wired magazine this month. His motivation came from someplace else. Where’s yours come from?

The Modern Condition

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 01:55:04 -0400

Fails,

I have to admit, a recent post left me totally speechless. Usually you come across something that might be witty, insightful, or just plain entertaining, but James Altucher just sucker punched me with his thoughtful candor. I couldn’t imagine a better post on the theme of failure.

There are always more items to check off the to do list, the game’s on, blogs need browsing, pick your excuse but there’s always something to keep you busy. It’s so easy to gloss over days, weeks, and just go about the task at hand. But where is all this taking you and at what cost?

Chris Dixon may talk about climbing the wrong hill (http://bit.ly/dcUreZ), but James brings that point home. I’m talking about right to the center of the issue, to the fundamental question of who you are, what the hell you actually believe in, and who believes in you.

Failure doesn’t just happen in the office or the classroom. There isn’t always a helpful reminder with a check minus at the top of the page. Failure can also creep up on you over the course of years when you’re paying attention to other things.

Do yourself a favor and read James’ post. It takes two minutes and will leave you reeling for hours:

http://bit.ly/hBqDKi

Special thanks to Roger E. for tweeting this link and turning me on to this post.

Defining Success

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 08:58:17 -0400

Phenomenal post by Ben Horowitz got my mind churning this morning. Discussing what differentiates successful CEO’s from the rest, he concludes:

“Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say: “I didn’t quit.”’

In the end, I’m a big believer that the guy who refuses to quit, who literally couldn’t face himself in the mirror if he walked away because his drive is totally all consuming and deeply personal, it’s that guy who is going to take a company all the way.

I was at a panel last night listening to Steve Messer (Linkshare) and Jeff Stewart (Mimeo) and they were asked if you can learn leadership. While you can absolutely increase the number of tools in your toolbox, you can’t teach visceral drive. It comes from the sort of primordial Freudian goo that somehow makes each of us who we are. It comes from school yard humiliation, broken hearts, whatever, but it’s the stuff that really motivates people. I knew a man who described character as “what you do when no one else is looking.” Well, the same goes for success. It’s the 10,000 failures that you pushed through when no one gave a flying f*k that get you to that moment of pure #tigerblood #winning.

To read all of Ben Horowitz’s article: http://tcrn.ch/ghrSGV

New Founders @FAIL!

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:22:48 -0400

I’m hosting the next installment of Founders @FAIL with Jon Stein (Betterment) and John Laramie (ADstruc).

These guys are the real deal. They’ve survived their first year as founders and know what it’s like to pitch the hell out of a room after the wrong end of 72 sleepless hours. They’ve begged, borrowed, and hustled their way through exploding term sheets, critical hires, and fires (both literal and figurative) and are killing it as they scale their companies despite the fact that Techcrunch has found another sexy new story to hunt down. The honeymoon may be over, but their big break is just around the next corner.

Well, these two guys are turning that corner right now.

Meet Jon Stein of Betterment and John Laramie of ADstruc. They’ve been battle tested over the past year. ADstruc jammed out a live product in a matter of a month and was the breakout darling of TechStars, navigating the notoriously tricky waters of being a “hot” startup. With $1.1MM in the bank from big name investors like DFJ Gotham, RRE, etc…these guys hit the ground running and know a thing or two about scaling a team.

Betterment killed it at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt, winning best NYC startup. But like the stone cold operator he is, Jon described that day by saying “we knew we were at the beginning of something big. But really, that day marked just one beginning in a series of many.”

So come hear these guys discuss their first year at the helm- the good, the bad, and everything in between.

WHEN: Monday April 18th, 6:30PM

WHERE: GENERAL ASSEMBLY

902 Broadway, 4th Floor New York

RSVP HERE: http://www.meetup.com/foundersatfail/events/17108205/

Building A Community

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 05:21:31 -0400

If my little experiment with Founders @Fail is going to become something more meaningful than a cliched embrace of an ironic topic, it’s going to be because we build a community that provides insight and support as we each struggle with the bumps and bruises of life in the startup trenches. A big part of building that community is getting to know each other.

Mark Davis has compared the NY Tech scene to High School (http://bit.ly/e2lzmN). In some sense that’s true, but I have to be honest, I wasn’t very cool in high school and I definitely didn’t know everybody. I constantly meet new people in NYC who are pretty damn impressive. I’d like to introduce you to one of them-

Founders @Fail member Jamie Kingsbery:

What was you biggest failure?

Well, one particularly interesting failure was an internal system I was working onfor managing releases within our company. When you release software, there are lots of repetitive steps: building the software, running automated tests, putting the compiled software onto a file server so others can use it, and tracking the different versions. Because there are several steps which are repetitive, they are error prone and it is easy to forget a step. When a mistake is made, if it is not caught right away it can have an impact on how easy it is for other people, internally or externally, to use the software. The project I worked on was to automate a lot of that build infrastructure. I ended up delivering the project late, which had compounding ramifications - my next project started late and the people who needed to use this internal system ended up not having it and had to do release steps manually. It also did not have appropriate documentation, so it was hard for other people to use my system.

What did you learn from the experience?

There were a few things. The most important thing I learned was that the difference between a successful software project and an unsuccessful one often has little to do with technical issues and often has more to do with planning and communication. I spent too long figuring out requirements for what a system should be, rather than what we needed right away. I then spent too long getting this software in the hands of other developers in the company.The documentation I focused on was system documentation (how the system was designed) which ended up not being very helpful. The documentation that proved to be helpful was end-user documentation. End-user documentation included any design decisions that the users (and other stakeholders) ultimately cared about anyway. It also provided a way of seeing where
complicated user interactions were, which provided insight into what could be improved in future versions. The system documentation ultimately ended up getting ignored.

What would you have done differently?

What I would have done differently, and what I did differently in future versions of that product and others, was focus on getting to a working prototype (minimum viable product) as quickly as possible. It doesn’t seem to really matter if it is internal build infrastructure or your external e-commerce site: the sooner you get things in people’s hands, the sooner they can tell you what is wrong with it, and the sooner they have
something that is actually useful. I found for subsequent releases, releasing smaller chunks of functionality was helpful, because the product steadily got better over time and I got feedback about what the actual pain-points in using it were. I set a limit for myself not to release more than 5 new improvements per release, which seemed to be enough that there was a difference but not so much of a difference that
there were unexpected changes.

I also focused less and less on things like architecture diagrams and domain models. They certainly have a place and can be useful sometimes, but what is more useful is knowing how users expect to use your system. Having user documentation that explains everything step by step, and then forcing yourself to follow that documentation, helps put yourself in the mindset of a user who has not been working on building
the system.

What are you working on now?

I am currently in transition. After working for a couple different startups (the latest one being Cross Commerce Media, a marketing technology company), I will be starting shortly at Yodle. At Yodle (http://www.yodle.com…), I will be leading the team that works on the algorithm that computes the optimal bid for Yodle’s clients. Yodle is growing really fast, and Iam excited to be part of the team. I also have a couple side projects going on. I post about once a month on my blog (http://kingsbery.net…), and after I get settled in at Yodle I plan on contributing to an open source project which helps developers understand the technical debt of their JavaScript code.

The Story of Fail

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:48:26 -0400

For those of you not maxing out your tech hipster cred with Hashable in Austin all week, I thought I’d commiserate with a few reflections on failure:

A comment posted by Steven Kane put a big smile on my face, thought you’d enjoy it:

“Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” -unknown (posted by Steven Kane on AVC comments)

In support of Steven’s claim, I’m posting an excerpt from Bijan of Spark Capital:

“The one thing I notice with some VCs and some hiring execs is their sometimes lack of appreciation of failure. Especially when the VC and startup ecosystem requires a huge amount of failure. I look at it differently and wonder about people that have never failed. Just like in skiing, if you don’t fall down it probably means you aren’t trying hard enough. Instead of dismissing a candidate with, “he/she must not be very good, that company was a failure”, I think it’s much more helpful to pay attention to what that person actually accomplished and attempted to accomplish.”

While I agree with Bijan, I actually place the burden on us failures. The fact of failure is not impressive in-and-of itself nor is it something to be ashamed of. In fact, it’s not noteworthy at all, unless you are able to extract actionable insight from the experience. To that end, unless you are able to put your failure in context and convey the lessons learned to VC’s, hiring execs, or anyone else in a position to assess your qualifications, your merits will go unacknowledged.

Do not let that happen. Practice your personal pitch. Tell that story and position your experience in the way you want others to hear it. Otherwise, people will come to their own conclusions.

To that end, I will be sharing fail stories from our very own members in upcoming emails. Our community has tremendous experience that deserves recognition. I’ll be highlighting one member’s experience per email. If you’d like to share your story, shoot me a note.

Schuyler

Full post: http://bit.ly/ftp2Yd…

Transformational Fail

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:47:53 -0400

In the mean time, wanted to share a little light reading on our favorite topic…

Daniel Markham summed up the reason you’re reading this email and not letting your filter send it to spam:

“What’s going to transform the world is failure…”

Now, before we get all teary eyed and self-congratulatory for recognizing this little fact, I want to clarify what it is we’re doing here with F@F. Failure is like a four letter word that most of us are taught to fear and avoid from a young age (along with dark alleys, clowns, and cholesterol). The truth is, failure is a critical component of our lives whether we like it or not. You can choose to embrace that fact or try to ignore it, however futile that may be.

My goal with F@F is to help us strip away the fear of failure by developing systems to facilitate the recognition and analysis of our failures so that we can learn from them.

Mr. Marham discusses the importance of such systems:

“In fact, the first thing I look at in any system of people is whether or not they have created a culture of failure. We desperately need more failure in the world, and we need to start encouraging it.

What?

You see, our mid-level manager and our politician made the same mistakes: they assumed that given the correct inputs, the correct output would occur. That is, if only the system were set up in such-and-such a way, the right results would happen.

But what are the “right” results? Well, for the manager, it was something to help the company. For the politician, let’s be honest, it was something to make him look good.

The problem is: innovation is not a science. It doesn’t work from the top-down. It works from the bottom-up. You can’t decide ahead of time that every problem has a solution that this particular team can discover. What I want to see in my agile teams is the ability to say “The parameters you have given us preclude us from achieving the goals you want. Therefore we must stop”

That’s failure. Cold, hard, honest failure. Sorry boss, it was a great idea but you were smoking crack. Either change the rules or stop. You’ve failed. It’s not happening. I know you made a nice speech to the board about how we’re going to change the face of the company, but that was rhetoric, this is reality.

Everything we see in modern culture, from TV to movies to Facebook, tells us that there are three modes: success, failure, or not trying. The vast majority of people are not trying. They sit around watching TV or playing games, content in the knowledge that if they do not try, they will never fail…

Failure — falling flat on your ass, painful, humiliating failure — is a critical part of innovation and startups. When good-meaning people try to sell you on some idea or plan for innovation that’s supposed to be great and heavenly, you have to ask yourself “How will this fail?”

Because if you’re not having failure — and a lot of it — it’s never going to work.”

You can read Mr. Markham’s full post here: http://bit.ly/fGIWD9…

Thanks to Colman Lynch for sharing this article. If you come across anything that you think fellow members would find interesting/useful, please share as well.

Designing for Fail

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:47:20 -0400

I wanted to share with you a very thoughtful piece written by one of our members, Jamie Kingsbery, on a relevant topic: designing for failure. In my mind, failure is inevitable. You can live your life trying to disprove my theory, but you will find it to be a frustrating project. The more important concern should be how to extract knowledge from those disappointments in order to inform the process going forward. That is only possible if the process itself is designed to acknowledge, analyze, and incorporate failures along the way. Jamie discusses a few strategies to design such a framework below:

“Games such as Twenty Questions or Guess Who make use of the principle that to identify a solution you should ask questions that give you as much information as possible. The best Yes/No questions split the solution space in two. Take this example: in Guess Who, there are more “men” cards then “women” cards, and some of the men have facial hair. When asking the first question, it is therefore not optimal to ask if your opponent picked a man (or woman), instead you should ask if your opponent picked someone with facial hair, since this splits the population in two. The same principal applies in learning about a new software project – early in a project, design decisions (either at a technical or a business level) should be done for the purpose of learning as much as possible.

When we are learning, either by ourselves or in a team, failure can be very valuable if we get a lot of information out of the failure. Whenever there is the possibility of failure, it helps to think in terms of the scientific method – form a hypothesis about what you think is going to happen, and then build the system to test the hypothesis. The hypothesis therefore has to be falsifiable – there has to be some objective way to know if your hypothesis failed or not.

There are several ways to learn from past history. In agile development, teams use a retrospective at the end of an iteration to discuss what went well and what can be improved, to establish actionable items that the team can do to improve and and to appoint owners of those items to ensure they get done. At a smaller level, having a coach, mentor or peer give you feedback about how a particular task or stretch of time went plays a similar role.

A team that fails intentionally in a way to learn more will develop a winning product faster than a team that does not. A team that puts infrastructure in place for learning from history, such as having retrospectives every two to six weeks, will improve faster than a team that continues doing things the same way it always has.”

The full article can be found here:

http://kingsbery.net/…

Happy failing fails!

A Culture of Fail

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:46:42 -0400

Thanks to Mark Davis for this little gem from Vivek Wadhwa in praise of Failure:

“After visiting Okinawa, Japan, and meeting with global experts on innovation, I’ve come to the conclusion that Silicon Valley’s greatest advantage isn’t its diversity; it is the fact that it accepts and glorifies failure. Like many other countries, Japan has tried replicating Silicon Valley. It built fancy tech parks, provided subsidies for R&D, and even created a magnificent new research university. Yet there are few tech startups, and there is little innovation; Japan’s economy is stagnant.

There is a reason for this stagnation.

In any country, innovation and economic growth come from startup ventures. But most Japanese don’t want to take the risk of starting a business. Indeed, the social stigma and financial repercussion of failure are so great that the founders of failed businesses become social outcasts; no one will work with them again or fund them; and all too often they end up committing suicide.

Jeff Char, who is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Tokyo-based incubator J-Seed Ventures, told me that he sees huge opportunities for startups in Japan, and that there is almost no competition there. One of his new ventures, Piku Media, is a Groupon clone that has been able to rapidly create a new market. In the Japanese tech industry, the playing field is wide open. There is also no shortage of experienced engineering talent. But, because society doesn’t tolerate failure or respect entrepreneurs, Char can’t get engineers to leave their industry jobs to join his startups. He also can’t find any experienced entrepreneurs to lead his companies: once entrepreneurs fail, they are out of the game. Hence most ventures in Japan are managed by first-time entrepreneurs. And of course they make the same mistakes as their predecessors — because there is no one for them to learn from.

In the old days, most businesses were in manufacturing, services, or retail. A business failure was associated with unethical practices or mismanagement. Things moved slowly. But the tech world is very different. Even though the basics of building a business are always the same, technology changes rapidly and so requires the creation of new business models. New technologies and business models are developed through experimentation. Entrepreneurs start risky ventures to test their ideas and raise financing from others who have been down the path before—and achieved success. And they learn from one another. Innovation is a by-product of this synergy and experimentation.

This is something that Silicon Valley figured out long ago, and that is how it left other tech centers in the dust. Failure is regarded as a badge of honor, not as an object of shame. When you meet tech entrepreneurs in Palo Alto or Berkeley and ask them what they do, they typically tell you about their current startup; then they start showing off about all of their previous failures—because to have failed means to have gained experience and to have learned.

Japan is an extreme, but things aren’t that different in other parts of the world. In Germany, for example, company founders are held personally liable for unpaid debt for up to 30 years—even after they declare bankruptcy. So if the business fails, they lose their house; their savings; practically everything they have. What’s worse: the Japanese and German entrepreneurs may also face criminal penalties and go to jail. So they try to avoid business exit at any cost—even if this means personally absorbing business losses. The result is that you see very few business startups, and those companies that are started take few risks.

The lesson that other regions need to learn from Silicon Valley is to glorify and embrace their failed entrepreneurs. Countries such as Germany, Japan, France, and India need to change their laws to allow high-tech companies to be started and shut down more easily. Their leaders need to work toward removing the stigma associated with failure. Their public needs to be educated to understand that, in the high-tech world at least, experimentation and risk-taking are the paths to success; that success is often preceded by one or more failures. This must be discussed frequently by political leaders and taught in schools. They should establish venture funds for entrepreneurs who are starting their second or third businesses after failing.

Innovation and growth result from courage, risk-taking, and opportunity. Japan, and countries offering similar discouragement to their potential entrepreneurs, won’t see significant innovation and economic growth until they appreciate entrepreneurs’ human qualities and build on them.”

ATTRIBUTION:
http://bit.ly/9sCisT…

Thanksgiving Fail

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:46:08 -0400

As you slowly emerge from your turkey induced stupor, I thought I might share a few thoughts on a topic near and dear to my heart: success. We all want it. We work hard for it. But in the end, despite all those late nights, we still find ourselves coming up short. I still live in my same dumpy apartment. I still can’t take my girlfriend on the vacation she really wants. So what the hell am I doing wrong?

Anil Dash helped answer that question with another, equally pointed question of his own in a recent post:

“Assuming you succeed, what do you want that success to look like? If you make a great app that gets tons of users, but it’s covered in ugly ads instead of the cleanly designed experience you initially created, will you be happy? If you make a huge amount of money but it’s because you’re selling tons of personal data on your users or clogging up the web with absolutely crappy content, will that be a fair trade to you? Is the continuum of choices in these matters something you’re willing to compromise on in exchange for making sure your kid goes to college? What if it’s just to buy yourself a fancy car?”

We’re bombarded with stories of success and failure every day. They’re the cornerstone of the media industry. And while it’s easy to scoff at the latest Flava Flav with his cars and jewelry, the truth is we allow others to define our sense of self worth and success more than we would care to admit. I suggest on a day like Thanksgiving, we all take a minute to step back and begin to consider what really makes us happy, what puts a smile on our face when no one else is looking. Start to connect the dots and figure out how to maximize those moments.

Schuyler

Attribution:

http://dashes.com/ani…

Weekend Fail

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:45:42 -0400

For those of you still asleep, stop slacking. It’s a beautiful Fall morning in New York and you’re wasting it. Here’s a wonderful little meditation to spark the creative juices over your morning coffee (courtesy of artist Mike Monteiro for GOOD):

Let’s be the boss. Let’s take the boss down. Let’s order too much of something just to see where our limits are. Let’s take a chance precisely because it might fail. Let’s take the hard way out. Let’s go to the moon. F*ck it; let’s go to the moon again. Let’s quit our jobs. Let’s work at being better at what we do by f*cking up faster, not less. Let’s f*ck up really fast. Let’s wrestle sharks, fight monsters, and disagree with the board.

Full Text of Essay:
http://www.good.is/po…

And now that you’re all riled up, here’s a very useful rubric to help you structure any idea, project, business, or aspiration courtesy of Brent Fitzgerald’s reflections on his former company, Swivel:

“I guess one of my Swivel takeaways is that visualizations are tools or lenses, and people will create visualizations out of need, in the contexts in which they are needed. It’s easier to start with the problem, then solve it, than the other way around.”

Full Text:
http://eagereyes.org/…

Brent tackles an important topic for any aspiring entrepreneur. Despite our enthusiasm for those wonderful shiny new ideas that captivate our imagination and germinate into the beginnings of a business, very few of us are able to accurately assess pain points that are at once scalable and directly relevant for not just you and a few friends, but hundreds, thousands, and millions of strangers around the world. The best businesses I’ve come across began as a pet project addressing the one most annoying pain point that incessantly bugged the entrepreneur in question to the point that they said, eff it, I can do this better…and they did. They hacked together a minimally viable product, got it out in the real world and saw how people used it, how they didn’t, and then iterated around actual user behavior. They didn’t sit around pontificating what the next Google would be. They solved the one problem that bugged the hell out of them and if you solve the one problem that’s driving you mad, it turns out, it might be annoying a few other million people as well…

So- Fails- I want to hear what’s bugging you, in 140 characters or less. Tweet me: foundersatFAIL

Oh, and happy weekend.