Fake failures aside, I didn't really appreciate the article.
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.
Unless you define everywhere on the spectrum of cultural attitudes towards failure as either "failure culture" or "Italy-like", you're beginning to understand my frustration with your first post.
I think they're just making a point about what the absence of any kind of acceptance of failure is like. It's not that there's a spectrum between "failure culture" and "Italy-like", it's that "failure culture" itself is the spectrum, and Italy-like is the point at the very end. It's what happens people don't respect failure.
OK, I think I get it. But that's what I've been taking issue with all along. There is little substance is running to the polar opposite as the only alternative. And the system of categorization seems like tee-ing up for just-so stories about the benefits of "failure culture" and "acceptance of failure."
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,'"
Places outside of Silicon Valley, within the USA have the same outlook.
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.
Not just Italy. That's pretty much the East Coast of the U.S. as well. Engineers looked at me like I wanted to start a cocaine trafficking network when I suggested starting a company back in school. The east coast is like Italy with worse weather.
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.
It's similar in Mexico. It’s not a coincidence that FuckUp Nights started there. It’s a very traditionalist and failure averse country, so that “making it” means being a manager in a good position in an old monopoly, even in entrepreneurial circles (even then, is limited to family-sized stable business). (It also helps that the upper-middle class in Mexico imitates american ways of life). So it’s an antidote for that location.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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, 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.
>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.
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....
The ideal of Silicon Valley (and of the U.S. in general) is that good-faith business failure shouldn't carry a lasting punishment. I like that. The last thing that I want is for us to become like many European and Asian societies where failure is shameful and often treated as permanent.
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.
Hey Michael, I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on this. I just wanted to say that I think the way you were treated (and continue to be treated by some) is abominable. I never had the opportunity to tell you since our time didn't overlap at Google. Even though you don't know me, I'll have your back.
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?
A culture that is accepting of failure is a good thing on balance, I think, but failure does have consequences beyond the personal ones of having to dust yourself off and steel yourself to try again. A Silicon Valley company I worked for "failed" by going bankrupt as a means to wriggle out of their various debts, only to be reborn phoenix like in a new guise.
Some of these debts were to banks and investors who no doubt half expect any given investment to fail, but others were to people like office fitters who were left in the hole for many thousands of dollars. I doubt that they move in circles so accepting of failure..
Being accepting of failure is a good thing, but you have to wonder about the moral hazard that's being set up here. A person should be able to pick themselves up after a failure, but failure should not be rewarded. You should not be able to go to a conference and brag about your failures. You should not be rewarded for failure with an acquihire and a cushy job at a BigCo. This to me is a key component of the new bubble: the idea that your startup can fail without there being consequences or even be rewarded for failure.
Under the assumption that success and failure reveals something about your skill, you are right.
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)".
Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, but I'm making the assumption that people should be rewarded for actual accomplishments. Failure is a learning experience, but it is not an accomplishment.
> This to me is a key component of the new bubble: the idea that your startup can fail without there being consequences or even be rewarded for failure.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy': that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.
The sad thing about the author's core anecdote is that he doesn't even understand what about his actions made him a failure. (He alludes to it at the end.) If your app/server is vulnerable to a single person taking it down with no recourse to where you "felt the grim reaper clasp [your] neck," then you have built a house of cards unable to withstand a gentle breeze. The issue isn't that your trust or lack of vetting, it's your dependency on others to build your idea; You're an idea person. It's true, he has no one to blame but himself, but not for trusting a stranger, but for want of software deployment skill.
It's good we have a culture of accepting failure. The fumblebrag comes from a different aspect of the culture: The culture of being a complete douchebag, pretending you're always "crushing it," creating the appearance of success, and taking yourself way too seriously. This tension is present in everything I read on HN.
There are only two people I know who ever actually "crushed" anything and who's success was a result of their own actions.
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.
Article starts off with a key element of the #fumblebrag: It was always ultimately someone else's fault. It was always some other loser that effed up. Your only flaw was not seeing in time what a loser that other guy was who caused you to fail.
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.
42 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 41.5 ms ] threadDo 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8782667
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.
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?
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
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.
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.