2011 22
Failure has to be accepted, but not encouraged
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Entrepreneurship with No Comments
Tonight in Paris, at dinner with @loic @geraldine and @ninavarsavsky, we spoke about attitudes towards failure in USA and Europe. In Europe it’s still terrible to fail and that is bad because failure is an essential part of success (think of all the sperm that fail to make a child). But in Silicon Valley, failure is becoming too much of the opposite: too accepted, people are not trying hard enough, too many start ups are getting funded as if VC’s knew there were bound to fail but went ahead anyway. In Europe now we are more like in Silicon Valley in 2006 when Fon got funded. Back then it was not that easy to get started. And that may not be all that bad. Failure has to be accepted, but not encouraged!
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Datamind on May 23, 2011 ·
With a cost of money at almost 0%, the best investment choice is to bet in every project. Failure tolerance is related to the cost of money. How many dollars you can affort to loose for any dollar you will earn.
Dave Stone on May 25, 2011 ·
Wonder if people accept failure quicker when they call it pivot?
peekfan on June 13, 2011 ·
what about Peek failure? Could you explain? I expect: NO!
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James Kennedy on May 22, 2011 ·
You could argue that the only failure us giving up. That doesn’t mean giving up on a single project, but giving up on finding a project that works.