Silicon Valley’s ‘fail your way to success’ mantra can be deadly to startups

It’s true that risk-taking is necessary to entrepreneurial achievement and failure can be instructive. But somehow those simple truths have morphed into something dangerous: a blind belief in the positive power of failure. It happened the way meanings get changed in a game of telephone. The words are passed from lip to ear, from ear to lip, and from lip to ear, changing a little each time, until the idea no longer resembles its original.

The first company I founded with my three business partners – Ravn, an adventure and experience marketplace – failed. I don’t regret that. We learned a lot. I do regret that we were so enamored of this idea of “failing our way to success” that we did not recognize failure more quickly. Admitting failure would have saved us a great deal of time, energy, and money. But we believed in the popular ideology. We thought it was an inevitable part of the startup struggle. We were so blind to the obvious signs that our business was not making it that we clung to every tiny success and glorified every hard-won, incremental gain. Persistence is necessary to success. But so is being realistic.

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Failure is a byproduct of experimentation. So if you have some failures to your credit, you are experimenting. And, as many have noted, experimentation is good. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is widely quoted as saying, ”The biggest risk is not taking any risk.” And thought leader and author Seth Godin has said, “The only thing worse than starting something and failing is not starting something.” But that is a far cry from the idea that even if all you do is fail, you will succeed.

One thing that all the great minds who express a belief in failure have in common? They also succeeded. Sometimes with historic significance. They looked at their failures, recognized them, learned the lessons each had to teach, and tried something else. And, looking back, they know what success looks like, and they know what failure looks like. And they value the failures for the excellent teachers they were. Building a company is hard, whether it’s successful or not. But one thing I know now after four years of record growth with our subsequent company is that success feels like success and failure feels like failure. If you haven’t seen both, it’s difficult to tell the difference.

Back during the Ravn days, it was not until my partners and I went to South by Southwest and discussed ideas with other startups that we realized we were kidding ourselves. We listened to entrepreneurs with ideas that weren’t working saying this was the path to success. And we saw ourselves reflected. We saw what was wrong with their ideas, that the marketplace wasn’t responding, and the obvious – if hard — next step they should take. And we knew, sadly, that we were doing exactly that. So we shuttered Ravn.

Closing Ravn was disappointing. But it was the right thing to do. I know this with certainty because I have a success to compare it with. When we later launched Touch of Modern, we immediately saw the difference between a concept consumers want and one we had to persuade them to want. With Ravn, we struggled for months to get a few thousand users. We had no such struggle with the new company. Before we were open for business, we turned the system on for a few seconds to test the payment processing system and people found us and placed orders. And when we went live, they found us quickly and in numbers that made it clear that this was what success looks like.

There is simply no way around the fact that, as an entrepreneur, you need to get one thing right:  The core part of your business. As you build that core business and expand on it, you are entitled to some failures. But if the core of your business is the experiment that’s failing, you have to recognize that. Fortunately for us, we found a looking glass at South by Southwest and were able to see our mistake reflected back at us. So even with blinders on, we managed to see it. If we hadn’t, we might still be failing.

Jerry Hum is the CEO and cofounder of Touch of Modern, a men’s e-commerce company.