Failure is defined as a lack of success or the inability to meet an expectation.
As the Elizabeth Holmes trial for alleged fraud at her startup Theranos winds on, the biggest question is: When the company’s blood-testing machines didn’t work, why didn’t she change tactics? Real entrepreneurs fail early and often. Ms. Holmes instead was stubborn and chose deception over failure. That’s a shame. Despite today’s IPO and SPAC fireworks, the truth is that in Silicon Valley, most ideas fail. Heck, most companies fail. More than half of venture-capital investments are smoking holes in the ground. Fortunately, success often rises from the ashes of ruin.
Some history of failure:
Thomas Edison had the most challenging time finding a filament for his incandescent light bulb. He tried bamboo, cedar, and flax until he discovered that carbonized cotton worked. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work,” Edison said.
Then there is the computer mouse. The Douglas Engelbart version of 1968 was a crude wooden block on two wheels with three buttons. Xerox PARC came up with a better mouse using a metal ball and motion sensors. Steve Jobs wanted one, so Apple hired a design firm, which came up with over 25 prototypes, all failures until a design in 1981 worked. Think of all the failed mice it took to create today’s curved mouse with multiple buttons, a scroll wheel, and optical sensors.
James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes over four years for his “cyclone” vacuum cleaner.
Entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield once tried to build a multiplayer online game but switched to photo sharing, selling Flickr to Yahoo in 2005 for $25 million. He started a company called Tiny Speck and built a game called “Glitch.” “Glitch” attracted tens of thousands of gamers, but not enough to cover its costs, so Mr. Butterfield killedit in 2012.
Tiny Speck pivoted, which in Silicon Valley means fail and scramble to do something else. The company had built its own crude internal communications system for employees to chat digitally during the development of “Glitch.” Seven months after they started work on Slack, the company announced its preview release. On the first day of release, 8,000 people requested the preview version. Now more than 10 million people use it daily. Mr. Butterfield sold Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion last year. That’s failing upward!
A friend once confessed to being nervous about joining a startup. “What if it fails?” he asked. I said, “So what? You’re still you. You won’t fail, though the company might. You can always get another job to make money or start something else.” Failure is an option, even if it isn’t the preferred one. I wish someone had told that to Ms. Holmes.
If you search for ‘Failure is An Option,’ you will see two different sayings. The opposite view is often expressed as ‘Failure is NOT an Option.’ My experience tells me that too many companies/products have overstayed their usefulness and needed a leader with failure as an option to shut things down. Americans are usually ‘pushed’ into the decision to shut down a project, product, or service. This is too late - too many careers and assets have been destroyed by then. Always, always have an Exit Plan! Theranos (Holmes) should have had an exit plan that included options when the technology didn’t work. She was traveling the world as a colossal success, touting the breakthrough technology. At the same time, the engineers struggled to make it work - she had her ego tied up in the product - failure (and resulting consequences) would be personal. Unfortunately, she is now in court with charges of deceiving investors - consequences of not admitting failure are real. Suggest you define the reason for failure and not who to blame - sets you up for success - autopsies of failure often do not work because they are negatively focused and many times self-serving (‘the product was ahead of its time’). Move on with lessons learned….
If the customer has killed your product/service or idea before you have, you have failed! You were not paying attention.
What is your favorite ‘failure’ story from your life experiences that turned out positively?
I was too many degrees of separation away from being fully in the know on this, but if you walk into any Safeway with a pharmacy you’ll find a wood paneled room next to the pharmacy that I believe is a remnant from the Theranos failure. It was supposed to be a clinic for rapid testing that the CEO at the time was betting the farm on. That CEO was ousted and the next CEO was there until just after the sale to Cerberus (Albertsons owner). I might be jumping over a few dots in the chain of events or even connecting the wrong dots but it seems pretty well connected. That or it’s my own little conspiracy theory. Thanks for the article! Failing is not a sin but dishonesty is.
Failure is Always an Option....
I was too many degrees of separation away from being fully in the know on this, but if you walk into any Safeway with a pharmacy you’ll find a wood paneled room next to the pharmacy that I believe is a remnant from the Theranos failure. It was supposed to be a clinic for rapid testing that the CEO at the time was betting the farm on. That CEO was ousted and the next CEO was there until just after the sale to Cerberus (Albertsons owner). I might be jumping over a few dots in the chain of events or even connecting the wrong dots but it seems pretty well connected. That or it’s my own little conspiracy theory. Thanks for the article! Failing is not a sin but dishonesty is.