Peter Thiel on Failure
In responding to the question "How important is failure in business?".
"I think failure is massively overrated. Most businesses fail for more than one reason. So when a business fails, you often don't learn anything at all because the failure was overdetermined. You will think it failed for reason 1, but it failed for reasons 2 through 5. And so the next business you start will fail for reason 2, and then for 3 and so on."
-Peter Thiel on Tim Ferris podcast (http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/), grabbed from his recent book, Tools of Titans
Definition of overdetermined: "To determine, account for, or cause something in more than one way or with more conditions than are necessary." In well-funded or established businesses that's entirely right, but for seed-funded and bootstrapped businesses I'm not sure Thiel is right. If you've only got a few months money in the bank you don't get to make mistakes 2 through 5 because mistake 1 is enough to shut down the company. That's one of the reasons why seed funding raises have been going up. When I started my business (which failed due to a single very obvious mistake[1]) a typical seed round was $100k. Now it's upwards of $250k. That extra money gives you room to make more than one bad call. [1] We spent so long making the product "perfect" we ran out of money before we had any customers. * Failure: The Secret to Success - A Honda Documentary - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOVig5H7UbM