Fail Early, Fail Often

Last year, while at a Venture Capital forum at Rice University, I learned a very important lesson that has helped me become a more successful entrepreneur. At one of the networking sessions of the forum I ran into Blair Garrou, a venture capitalist at DFJ Mercury. At one point during our conversation, I asked him if he had any advice for an entrepreneur. Right away he told me, “fail early, fail often“.

I have been involved in a number of startups in the past three years. In that time, I’ve learned a lot from the things I’ve done right and wrong. I’ve received a lot of advice – both good and bad – but the Fail Early, Fail Often advice has stayed with me. Over time I’ve come to understand how important it is to follow it.

What is an entrepreneur?

The essence of this advice has to do with what it means to be an entrepreneur. I talked in-depth about this with Hans Taparia, a serial entrepreneur who helped found ASG-Omni, Tejas Networks, TastyBite, and is now a professor at NYU. To Hans, an entrepreneur isn’t someone who has a brilliant idea and dedicates him/herself to turning that into a business. Rather, an entrepreneur is someone who is out to change the world. It’s not about one single idea, which may or may not work. In other words, the startup is not the end goal, changing the world is. One particular idea/startup is a means to that end. Just one way to change the world. But there are others.

There is evidence for this view, too. The Startup Genome, which analyzed data from hundreds of startups to determine the traits that made them more likely to succeed or fail, found that entrepreneurs are motivated by passion, not money.

For example, let’s think about an entrepreneur who runs a social gaming platform where families can play against each other. That idea may or may not work. Regardless, it is important to identify the entrepreneur’s real goal – is his goal about making games for families, or is it something greater, like building deeper connections between people from different families and generating happiness? I would hope for the latter; building games is just one way to get there. When you look at it that way, it becomes easier to look at your startup objectively. In this example, the entrepreneur can look at his social gaming startup and ask himself – “am I on the track to success, or have I stagnated?” If it looks like the whole thing is stagnating and the business is plateauing/not growing, it may be better to think of a better way to achieve the end goal, drop the current idea, and change direction. It may even be the case that you find another goal you are even more passionate about, and think of an exciting way of reaching that goal. Whatever happens, don’t let yourself stagnate.

I think a lot of people have trouble with this, for a couple of reasons. As entrepreneurs, we get emotionally attached to the companies we build. Also, admitting to yourself that an idea is not going to work out is admitting failure, and that is hard for most people to do, let alone entrepreneurs. Of course, I am not advocating that you quit at the first sign of hardship. My point, however, is that there is a time to quit. I can’t tell you when that time is, but at a certain point it should become clear to you that the current idea won’t work out, and your time could be better spent elsewhere.

Do not stagnate

To summarize: don’t get bogged down on one idea for too long. Just like it is possible for you to stagnate your career at a large corporation, causing you to spend five years in a dead-end role that won’t do anything to help you grow, it is possible (and even likely) for an entrepreneur to stagnate at a startup. This is especially true of you are a “part-time” entrepreneur, holding down a full-time job or university career while starting your company on the side. It might not be obvious to you that your idea isn’t going anywhere in that case. At any rate, keep this in mind: define your end goal and work relentlessly towards it. After all…

It is a lot better to fail 9 times and succeed on your 10th try than only try once and stagnate, neither failing nor succeeding (which is really failing).

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