Failure is massively overrated

Q: How important is failure in business?

A: Well, I think failure is massively overrated.

Most businesses fail for more than one reason.

And so when a business fails, you often don’t learn anything at all because the failure was overdetermined.

You will think it failed for reason number one, but it failed for reasons numbers one through five.

And so the next business you start will fail for reason number two and then for three and so on.

And so I think people actually do not learn very much from failure, and I think it ends up being quite damaging and demoralizing to people in the long run.

My sense is that the death of every business is a tragedy.

It’s not some sort of beautiful aesthetic where there’s a lot of carnage, but that’s how progress happens, and it’s not some sort of educational imperative.

So I think failure is neither a Darwinian nor an educational imperative.

Failure is always simply a tragedy.