The apotheosis of a loser or how I like failing startups and their founders

Whoever does not understand his past, has to go through it again

We cannot predetermine success or failure. Nobody knows how to repeat the successes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. But you know, there is a common expression: “Success is hunger, which can be satisfied by eating bad luck.”

According to statistics, only ten percent of startups become successful, which cannot be said about the remaining ninety percent. It seems that you can legitimately call these ninety percent of failed startups “failures,” but this will be wrong. The exact definition, as I see it, would be “striving for success.”

Many work hard, many fail, many lose their jobs, and sometimes money, family and precious moments of life. Ninety percent of the victims of the fiasco are much better entrepreneurs than those lucky ones who were “immediately flooded”. Drawing parallels with the theory of Nassim Nicholas Taleb , we live in a world in which most swans are white and businesses are unsuccessful. Black swans are almost as rare as successful businesses. The thorny path of a successful startup is littered with the corpses of his fellows.

“Business is war,” said Konosuke Matsushita , founder of Matsushita Electric, a little earlier. After that, on the first pages of textbooks on management, they published that “all laws of war apply to the art of doing business. Since then, nothing has changed, and to this day, the "Asian dragons" of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are headed by growth ratings. Such successes, in the most direct and direct way, indicate the effectiveness of the strategy and management adopted in these countries.
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What's the secret? It's simple. In these countries, with deep respect belong to the traditional philosophy and ethics, built on the attention will now fly a bird of the ancient military code "Bushido", and "business is war!"

I admire the unsuccessful startups and their founders, who did not abandon everything after the failure. They continue to work, knowing that in case of failure, the battle is lost, not war.

Any well-conceived startup can shoot, but without the experience of failures, it is almost doomed to failure. Collect particles of experience, help and cherish your failures, they will play you in good stead. A successful startup can not be a blitzkrieg, it is more like a long protracted positional war in which tactical retreats are inevitable. After each failure, conduct a debriefing. Reverse engineering of a failed startup will allow you to understand your mistakes and use them to analyze things similar to your business, with the result that in the next “battle” you are simply doomed to success.

Throwing a coin, you never know what will fall. You can not throw on obverse all the time. Success and failure are linked together like two sides of a coin. If you want to succeed in this game - keep tossing a coin. When? You decide.