this notion that you need to fail seems wrong. Facebook, Microsoft, google never came close to failing and never had big failures yet still had innovations.
Google: Wave, Orkut, Google+, Google Video, Google Glass [1]
Microsoft: Band, Bob, Kin, Zune, Lumia, Windows 8 [2]
Facebook: Poke, Parse, Beacon, Credits, Paper, Slingshot, Libra [3]
That's just products. If you go into security breaches, lawsuits, and operating procedures, you could list several more.
These companies are large enough to have big failures and still keep kicking, and have people start to forget the failures over time (I had forgotten several of these myself). But they definitely aren't immune to having big failures.
[1]: https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2018/2/26/googles-product-fai...
[2]: https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-failures-windows-vista-cortana...
Except those companies, or the people who founded them, also had early failures. For instance, Zuckerberg's original site was more akin to "Hot or Not" than Facebook and got shut down by Harvard. Gates certainly had failures, as did Larry and Sergey. Just because the company they founded was successful from inception doesn't mean it wasn't a struggle to figure out how to get there. It would be wild to me to assume that there are people out there, walking among us, who have never failed.
Microsoft has had a number of failed products, even some versions of windows are considered to be failures.
Each company has learned from the failures though, which I think is a main point of the article.
Can’t be here until you observed back there, because here does not exist without having moved from back there to here.
Qualifying it as failure is subjective and crap poetry coupled to contemporary productivity culture. It’s a success in that you learned. It’s only a failure because it didn’t unicorn.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't making anything.