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This. Nothing succeeds like failure.

I've actually heard of VCs who prefer founders who have had high-profile failures because their theory is those founders will have learned a bunch of valuable (expensive) lessons. The null hypothesis for me is those founders may not have learned those lessons and may just not be that great.

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This seems to me like expecting that someone indicted for a crime will learn their lesson and be less likely than average to commit crimes in the future. It makes some sense in the abstract, except that we have tons of empirical evidence that those people are more likely to commit future crimes.

Or perhaps expecting someone who committed crimes and got caught to have learned how to not get caught.

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