In Silicon Valley, stories about failure are a form of social currency
medium.com
medium.com
Do you know what you get without failure culture? Italy. In my home country, if you fuck up it's over. People will laugh at your totally unrealistic attempt to strive for more. Everyone must fall to the lowest denominator.
Italians don't see failure as a short-term result, but as a lesson about life itself.
So it's one or the other then? No spectrum in between, just pick one? Interesting to know.
Personally, I think this 'failure as a badge of wisdom' is one of the 'secret' ingredients for the 'Silicon Valley' recipe.
It's a pretty good read. The relevant section regarding Italy: "Thiel’s identification of the indefinite pessimists: modern-day Europeans. 'The world is going to hell in a hand basket, so we might as well as drink and be merry,'"
Everywhere has people who have go-nowhere attitudes, but it all depends on the type of people you know, it's not universal. The thing unique to the Valley is that it has people flush with capital that encourage large, repeated, expensive risk taking in tech products with low expectations of success. And, spoiler warning, there is nothing secret about it.
When you're confronted with the "Fail Fast" trope as often folks on here are, it gets predictable to the point where it can be mocked. That's cool. #fumblebrag is actually a pretty hilarious term.
But at the end of the day, as long as we're not too cynical, I believe that a culture that nurtures taking chances to the point where Fumblebrag exists is, on the balance, much better than the alternative.
THAT would be failure. That's real, with real consequences. That is hard to get out of, and when someone does that person usually has a valuable lesson to share. I have no doubt there are some failures like that out there, but they almost never share their story.
What we have instead is a plethora of fake failures who experienced a few hiccups on their path to success. The current way the word failure is used is like "awesome" or "incredible" or any of these other top-shelf words used for rather mundane occurances. It cheapens our language for no reason.
- Anyone who actually is driven to the point of actually committing suicide will not be around to tell stories for obvious reasons.
- Anyone who is driven to the point of bankruptcy is unlikely to stick around the Valley with its incredibly high cost of living, (unless you are talking to the homeless, which it sounds like you aren't because there are plenty of stories of failures to hear).
- He or she also probably doesn't have money for a therapist.
Realistically, the reason people like failure stories is because it is encouraging when you are in the midst of one to see examples of cases where "it gets better". It doesn't cheapen our language to use failure in this way any more than it cheapens our language to use any other form of hyperbole.
That's cold comfort in a world where "literally" now also means "figuratively."
There.
See, the thing is, nobody actually wants to hear that shit. Everybody wants to hear about why that whole period of life was actually really amazing (and some parts of it were pretty good), or they want to hear the upbeat happy ending (and there is one, in this case).
But nobody wants to actually hear about a lack of success, or, like that Cake song goes, a bit of interrupted prosperity.
The people that have those stories to tell pretty quickly learn not to tell them, and what's left are people whose version of failure is, "I screwed up an account one time."
Here in Austin, my total monthly bills as a single guy are still less than $1000. I can much more easily afford to take financial risks.
I would have gone bankrupt at least four times in a more expensive city. Was an indispensable benefit in the early years.
There are too many people willing to seed a decent product to go all-in with anything except time and soul.
Chris Sacca has a pretty damned interesting tale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VOQnK7O2To
Failure may be perfectly acceptable in SV and in the US generally, but the tradeoff is that we are generally expected to treat failure as a temporary status, something that happens on the way to success.
Note that I said it was a status, not a category of person. You say "what we have instead is a plethora of fake failures who experienced a few hiccups on their path to success..." -- but the whole concept of a person being a "failure" is what SV doesn't really have. You aren't a failure; your crappy business was a failure, a failed attempt at something. And now you have learned from it, are moving on, etc.
There are lots of brutal failure stories in SV, and they were not fake at all at the time they were happening. Subsequent success does not invalidate the failure you experience.
It took a while to shake that one off.
And, I'll tell you that it turns out that it is is much easier to start from zero than start from the basement.
But now you're wiser, so that won't happen again. You won't "allow access" so carelessly. Because you're really important. And now you know the importance of that.
The hundreds of others I've met it was either dumb luck, they started already having been successful, or they just fake the entire thing.
The number of success stories in the Bay Area that are not a result of nepotism are few and far between. I don't say that with a sense of disdain, just reality. Because the majority of my own success can be attributed to nepotism.
Under the assumption that success or failure are basically independent of innate skill and the only thing that determines one's ability is number and length of prior attempts (experience), bragging with failures can make sense. The message is not "I have failed four times", it's "I have tried four times (failed, but that's almost secondary)".
If I'm entering a particular industry, it may be worth real money to me to hear the details of someone's failed startup in that industry.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
- The Letters of JRR Tolkien
That said, the Valley's true attitude toward failure is deeply classist. If you're well-connected because your daddy golfs with VCs, then you can take big risks with your startup knowing that, even if it fails, they'll just have it acqui-hired and give you another one. If you tire out in the pilot seat, they'll make you a VP at Facebook or Google and it's up to you whether you actually do any work for the next 3 years. This isn't some general policy of tolerating good-faith failure by talented people. It's protecting a social class. (Oh, and they excuse a lot of bad-faith failure, as well.)
On the other hand, if you're from middle-class or lower origins, the results of failure in the Valley are very much Old World. I worked at Google 3 years ago, drew the manager with a 5-year history of using phony performance issues to tease out subordinates' health issues and then fucking with them. (I have cyclothymia, which sometimes produces hypergraphia.) Between that, and a quixotic attempt to save a major component of Google+ from complete failure (with a suggestion that had a lot of engineer support, and would have worked) I... ended up with more of a mailing-list presence than I should have had. You could say that this was a fuck-up on my part and you wouldn't be wrong. And here's the thing... 3 years later, I still get shit for it: job offers shot down, ill-informed comments about me on Hacker News, etc.
So excuse me when I say this, but fuck this classist double standard about failure. I had to fight through mountains of shit over a bunch of stupid mailing-list posts, most of which were dead-to-rights accurate, and that failed more because of their tone rather than content... but if you're rich and well-connected and cause a company to melt down, ending 150 jobs, through mismanagement and reckless risk-taking, you're a hero? How the fuck does that make any sense? And why do we excuse people who do things that are actually unethical as if slimy behavior were the same thing as first-iteration roughness of a new product, when it's clearly not?
The actual Silicon Valley is one where if you're well-connected, you can fail all over the place in ways that actually hurt people, and that's OK. If you're perceived as an outsider (see: Ellen Pao) then even the slightest mistakes will give people cause to destroy your reputation. Let's get rid of all this nonsense-- the clubby VCs, the slimy back-channeling-- and figure out a way to start fresh. I absolutely agree that the stigma on good-faith business failure out to go away. I'd love to see a world where small-business bank loans didn't require personal liability (defeating the purpose of limited-liability protections) and where mid-risk/mid-growth ("lifestyle") businesses (instead of get-big-or-die gambits) could find funding. But there's a classist, duplicitous edifice that we may have to take down first.
I love reading your blog btw, even if I don't always agree with you. As far as the G+ component, well, I think the proof is in how it ended up :-/
I just wanted to say that I think the way you were treated (and continue to be treated by some) is abominable.
It was a learning experience. It made for some challenging years, but I think I'll come out on top of all this.
As far as the G+ component, well, I think the proof is in how it ended up :-/
Well said. Google's problem is that it views engineering (well, specifically, C++ engineering) as "smart people work" and everything else-- product development, HR and people management, aesthetics-- as "stupid people work". Thus, Google ends up with some top-flight C++ engineers whom I couldn't possibly compete with, but... guess what kind of person ends up designing its performance reviews, or deciding how to direct your products?