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Comment by littletimmy | Hacker News Reader

I've actually never heard a true failure story in silicon valley. Something like... "I started this company with my entire life's worth of savings, but it blew up. So now I have no income and my wife left me along with the kids. My life isn't worth living anymore and I am seeing a therapist thrice a week to stop blowing my brains out."

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.

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If this is your standard for failure, you're going to experience quite a bit of selection bias:

- 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.

I gave up a well-paying job moving up the IT ranks at a major national recession-proof corporation because I came down with a case of wanderlust. I squandered the money I had left and found a passion as a rock climbing instructor that left me worse off than broke. I owed money to two different national banks and was unable to open a new checking account anywhere for years. I worked a retail job for an outdoor store in one of the most economically depressed areas of the state, until I was fired for constantly being five to fifteen minutes late to work. I had no other job prospects and was left with a resume and work history that would ensure I was unemployable at my previous levels for pretty much the rest of my life. I gambled what I had left, which was almost nothing, and moved to another place with the hopes of getting a job I saw in a newspaper ad and starting over again. I was homeless and I lived out of my car for a while.

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."

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."

The problem of words having different magnitudes of potency depending on context is different from words being used to mean the exact opposite of their meaning in a non-ironic way.

The story of Jody Sherman, who killed himself when his startup (Ecomom) failed, has stuck with me since it happened, despite not knowing him or the site. It seems rare for it to get to that point but it definitely does happen. I just think we don't hear about it very often because people go quiet or aren't around any more.

>I've actually never heard a true failure story in silicon valley Chances are you haven't heard that story because the people it happens to are too busy seeing their therapist to post on HN and tell you about it.

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.

Yeah, I recently heard someone talking about taking huge personal financial risk to keep a startup going and suggested maybe it's time to live and learn and start over with a hell of a lot better product-market fit or spend that money on Treehouse and an apartment for a few months to learn how to build something, which could just be their first successful product.

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

There's been quite a few on HN that may not involve suicidal ideation, but definitely involve real loss and end with "now my company's gone": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ7ARqRT1hI And suicide does show up in the results....

I suspect that as costs of living rise even more in SV, the cost of failure increases and the less people are willing to risk since the cost of failure is high.

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.

Yeah that's huge. In Montreal I had all that, plus free healthcare.

I would have gone bankrupt at least four times in a more expensive city. Was an indispensable benefit in the early years.

Hey, I did that. Except it was in Austin, not SV. And I couldn't afford a therapist, but could afford booze.

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.

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