On Admiring Failure

I often hear someone say: “I don’t want to deal with him — he’s got a track record of failures.” And I suppose if it’s a systemic thing, where a person repeats the same mistakes over and over, that really is a warning sign. But more often it’s the other way around: it’s precisely the people who have lived through their failures and pulled lessons out of them who end up far stronger and far more seasoned than those who haven’t hit a wall yet.

From childhood, fairy tales teach us that everything ends well. And somewhere deep down we come to believe that anyone who hasn’t fallen yet must hold some secret formula for success — that they can be trusted without a second thought. But that’s the opposite of the truth. Everything happens for the first time. A failure isn’t always the result of a personal mistake or someone’s incompetence. Often it’s just a consequence of context: a combination of hundreds of external factors the person simply couldn’t have influenced.

The venture industry is a beautiful example. Here a startup’s failure is taken as the norm. More than that — funds often invite the founders of failed projects onto their investment committees, or name them “founder in residence,” an entrepreneur kept on the bench, ready to join a new project. A great example is Sam Altman, the current head of OpenAI (the team that gave the world ChatGPT). His first startup, Loopt, failed, but after that he was brought into the Y Combinator accelerator, where he made such a mark that he eventually came to lead OpenAI. And here’s the result: a man who failed and lost his investors’ money ends up changing the future of the planet.

I personally know an entrepreneur who moved to the US from Taiwan. Her first big project didn’t take off either. Yet today she’s the managing partner of a successful venture fund that invests in the most cutting-edge technology companies — and I’m one of its investors.

I’ll be honest: I respect people who have lived through serious trials and drawn lessons from them far more than those still wearing rose-tinted glasses thanks to a lucky run of circumstances. The first kind have a wider view, a deeper understanding, and fewer illusions.

For over a year now my team has been running a hard project in a field that’s a national priority, where almost nothing went according to plan, and we feel an enormous amount of pressure. When people ask me, “How can anyone keep working with you?”, I answer: “We’re exactly who you should keep working with. We’ve walked this road. Any other team would step on the same rake for the first time.”

Here’s to valuing the ones who didn’t break but kept going. Those are the people whose real experience sets them apart from accidental success! 😎