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Comment by wilfra | Hacker News Reader

Most people would agree you with you. But that doesn't make you, or them, correct. You should learn to embrace failure as a completely normal and natural part of success, instead of fearing it. This story, and the fact that he is proud of it, is evidence that he gets that.

I have no idea who this guy is but if I could buy stock in his future right now, I would. I can't say the same for anybody who reads this and thinks he's foolish.

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Successful people have certainly failed, but spectacular failure isn't a particularly good sign of future success. You should only embrace failure if you are learning things. Successful people treat failures as the price of learning.

I admire this guy's persistence, but not his incredible arrogance ("swaggadocio", "sound my huge balls made as I sauntered"), his poor risk/reward assessment, or his lack of lateral thinking skills.

His behavior only makes sense if having name "zap" is the riskiest thing in his current business plan. If everything hinges on him having a specific fancy domain name, then I doubt he'll be delivering sufficient customer value to his users to build a real business. And if that wasn't the riskiest thing, then he's just wasted a lot of time and money in a poorly planned exercise to get something that was a shiny distraction.

That sort of behavior is a great example of why solo founders are dangerous. Startups are endlessly distracting, and a good partner can keep you from taking off like a missile at something that, in the end, isn't core to what you're up to.

Failure as part of the hustle is not a learning process in the same way as a failed startup is. Sure, you can learn something, but if you aren't getting rejected often in sales, you're simply not trying hard enough.

That view isn't totally unreasonable in the context of an established product with proven product-market fit. But it is incredibly dangerous when what you're selling may have no value at all. This guy is definitely too early in the process to be testing the hypothesis, "Hey, maybe I'm just not enough of a dramatic stalker." And if he did want to test that he shouldn't start by doing it with such a high-value target.

I would not. Not all failure is created equal. Failing is fine. Even failing big is fine. But the risk has to be worth the reward. His reward was a name. That's it - not the success or failure of the project he wanted to start, but just the name. Sure, names are important, but spending this much effort on the name and not the project itself does not, to me, indicate good judgement on where one's efforts are best spent.

"Learning to embrace failure" is not an excuse to avoid basic cost analysis.

"I have no idea who this guy is but if I could buy stock in his future right now, I would. I can't say the same for anybody who reads this and thinks he's foolish."

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