The culture of failure
I love failure and I want to fail more. While looking at videos over at Stanford’s Entrepreneur’s corner, I stumbled upon one video from Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm. What he says is true of the valley, and of entrepreneurship in general; one must embrace failure. ‘Fail often, fail fast‘ is a mantra typically enunciated by startup types.
This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that execution is king and rapid iteration comes to mind. There is no point to wait on the perfect idea, the perfect plan. Does that imply that we should throw away the adage ‘Measure twice, cut once‘? But does that mean that we have a free license to push out a lot of crappy code? I think not.
Another rule of thumb I came across was ‘Be pessimistic in the short term, optimistic in the long term‘ which I think ties both ideas together.
The time to act is NOW. The best plan to execute is the one right NOW. Innovation is driven by failure. Success is a by-product of failure… or is it?
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 @ 3:24 pm 
business, entrepreneurship
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September 23rd, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Except when it’s too expensive to fail…
We’re lucky to be in the software industry where failures *usually* aren’t the end of the world but there are certainly lots of deadly counterexamples (Therac-25)
Kevin Kelly just posted about this today. For instance, take airplane design. Failures are rare but completely catastrophic. This makes it hard to rely on smaller/minor failures.
What’s the solution? He calls it “looking for ugly.” It’s a really great post: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/09/looking_for_ugl.php