Entrepreneurs: Shutting Down isn’t Quitting
by Miki Saxon
A link at SF Gate led me to When You Should Quit Being An Entrepreneur at Business Insider. It’s one of those articles with an interesting premise written by someone with no authority on the subject and little real-world experience. This was mentioned in the comments, which have more value than the article.
The most glaring misstatement was that shutting down your startup equaled failure.
Admitting that you are riding a dead horse does not equal failure.
It’s also stupid to say that a startup fails if it does anything other than go public.
Based on that Zappos was a failure, as are the thousands (millions?) of startups that grow moderately, if at all, but provide a decent living for the entrepreneur, not to mention jobs for others.
And there are those that choose to stay private, such as SAS and its $2.43 billion in sales.
Shutting down a startup doesn’t mean you quit being an entrepreneur; being an entrepreneur is as much a matter of right idea / right time / right place / right circumstances as it is of your MAP.
And entrepreneur is not the same as entrepreneurial, which you can be in any size company, and defaming corporate jobs as of less value and that by working in one you are a failure is pure garbage.
As so many of the comments pointed out, failure only happens when nothing is learned and even that isn’t failure if you consider Einstein’s comment that expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over is insanity, not failure.
In my book the only time you can actually fail is when you are dead and as long as you weren’t the cause you still didn’t fail.
Flickr image credit: taygete05
