If The Shoe Fits: Trophies and Startupland.
by Miki Saxon
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.
Regular readers know I have a thing for CB Insight’s co-founder Anand Sanwal and the newsletter he writes. The great data is a given, but the real draw for me are his common sense and wicked sense of humor, both of which infuse his prose creating an irresistible combination.
Monday’s newsletter shared a contrarian view of failure taken from his presentation at last year’s at SaaStr.
Acknowledging and being ok with failure is one of the best things about the startup community. We now celebrate the act of writing a startup failure post-mortem as courageous. (…) Most are vapid puff-piece post-mortems that talk about being too early to market or suggest investors weren’t committed or offer up trite discussion of why they’ve joined a “larger platform” whose vision aligns with theirs.
Once again Anand is my hero by saying stuff out loud that needs to be said.
I’ve always believed that failure is a learning opportunity, but I never thought it should be enshrined and lauded.
Any more than Mark Zukerberg’s “move fast and break it” should have become a startup mantra.
Anand ends with this comment.
Now, even when you fail, you are a success.
Yup — in Startupland, everyone is a winner.
It reminds me of today’s “everybody gets a trophy” attitude.
Jean M. Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. “But the ‘everybody gets a trophy’ mentality basically says that you’re going to get rewarded just for showing up. That won’t build true self-esteem; instead, it builds this empty sense of ‘I’m just fantastic, not because I did anything but just because I’m here.’”
That attitude permeates everything else, so why should Startupland be any different?
Image credit: HikingArtist
