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.
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.
So it's one or the other then? No spectrum in between, just pick one? Interesting to know.