Does failure lead to success? Not necessarily, according to Geoff Lewis, a partner at Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm. Writing in the Washington Post, he cites with disapproval this statement by a near-billionaire overheard in a trendy San Francisco coffee shop: “I failed my way to success. Whenever anyone asks me what the secret to success is, I tell them to fail. A lot. Keep failing. Eventually success will find you.”
Writes Lewis, “I recoil when the merits of failure are so vastly overstated and its agonies so trivialized.” He adds that today, wildly successful people package failure as fast fashion ready for mass consumption when in fact failure can cause employees to lose their jobs and investors to lose significant amounts of money. “Rather than being a springboard to greatness,” he writes, “failure can simply be devastating.”
If you are a strong proponent of failure, you might want to attend FailCon, although this year’s event in San Francisco, writes Lewis, failed to open as scheduled. Nevertheless, you can host your own event.
In his Post article, Lewis relates views on failure from entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and real-estate broker Barbara Corcoran (who claims to specialize in failure). He relates attitudes regarding failure to companies including Formspring (which failed) as well as YouTube, Twitter, and Groupon (all three of which succeeded when relaunched after failing at their initial visions). He also comments on Procter & Gamble, where he once worked—the company may be on the road to failure after a period of success. “We are a shell of our former selves,” a friend at the company tells him.
Lewis also cites venture capitalist Dave McClure’s efforts to “manufacture fail” as a path to learning. But, writes Lewis, “Empirically, it’s not clear that an entrepreneur can learn anything from failure.”
I can agree with Mark Cuban that “Failure is part of the success equation.” Failure is necessary, but far from sufficient. As Lewis puts it, “The failure pendulum has swung too far toward celebration. I’d like to see it swing back a bit toward fear.”
Read Lewis’s complete article here.
