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Jimmy Wales' Theory of Failure
Hugh Pickens writes "The Tampa Tribune reports that Jimmy Wales recently spoke at the TEDx conference in Tampa about the three big failures he had before he started Wikipedia, and what he learned from them. In 1996 Wales started an Internet service to connect downtown lunchers with area restaurants. 'The result was failure,' says Wales. 'In 1996, restaurant owners looked at me like I was from Mars.' Next Wales started a search engine company called 3Apes. In three months, it was taken over by Chinese hackers and the project failed. Third was an online encyclopedia called Nupedia, a free encyclopedia created by paid experts. Wales spent $250,000 for writers to make 12 articles, and it failed. Finally, Wales had a 'really dumb idea,' a free encyclopedia written by anyone who wanted to contribute. That became Wikipedia, which is now one of the top 10 most-popular Web sites in the world. This leads to Wales' theories of failure: fail faster — if a project is doomed, shut it down quickly; don't tie your ego to any one project — if it stumbles, you'll be unable to move forward; real entrepreneurs fail; fail a lot but enjoy yourself along the way; if you handle these things well, 'you will succeed.'"
I've seen other articles about failure being good for the creative process, namely the cover story of Wired a couple months ago. The thing is, if these people had continued failing and never had a success, we would never have heard of them. Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.
Oh, and everyone's got their own version of it. I've heard people correct me when I said "Fail Early, Fail Often" and they say that the order matters. But you'll hear three concepts in these phrases:
So the ultimate incarnation I've heard of this is "Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap."
Now for the warning: if you take this too much to heart, you see people axing everything. And from the technical point of view, it sucks. And is demoralizing. Another thing is you get really really sick of hearing it and just being the silver bullet response to "why can't I do X?"
My work here is dung.
Another real challenge is being able to continue to fund failure. Always seek external funding before you think you need it! When you are forced to put your rent on your charge card your tolerance for failure decreases significantly.
The trouble with the media is that they love the one try-one hit wonders - the folks who started and hit big. Basically, the folks who won the entrepreneur lottery: Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Amazon, companies like that and the people behind them. It's real easy to get the impression that you just have an idea, VCs knock on your door, and you get rich quick.
Early failure is one of the advantages of agile software development as well. The earlier you fail, the less it costs.
It's even older than you think. Winston Churchill is quoted as saying "Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." And how about the Chinese proverb, "Fall down 7 times get up 8." However, it must be tempered with the following advice, I don't know who said it: "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."
Currently hooked on AMP
The point is not to fear failure and to view a single failure as the end of the world forever.
The ideas of failure that have been ingrained into you by school and your corporate overlords is bogus.
The point is not to give up after your first attempt ever.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...I don't know who said it: "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."
Seems it was Benjamin Franklin, in the guise of Poor Richard.
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
The company I work for is the leader of their industry. If they had come to me with the initial idea, I would have laughed at them and said 'forget it.' 2 years in, they were still losing money daily. They were the very image of failure.
And now, over 4 years later, the industry they created has some competition, but despite their competition throwing millions of dollars (each!) at the market, we are still far and above them. Some have even given up.
So don't be so sure that you've failed just because you've not made a profit in 3 months.
Yes, there are times to cut and run, but don't assume everything that looks bad will fail.
I wouldn't exactly call Wikipedia a "success." Just because something is popular doesn't mean the world is better off for it to have been made. I submit as proof of concept: 4chan.
Wikipedia is a great source for winning internet debates. And that's about it. But people treat it like it's actually a credible source, under the delusion that any incorrect information will be crowd-source corrected.
I got news for you, the majority of people are *idiots.* Common knowledge is usually WRONG. I think the world would have been better off if wikipedia had failed too, rather than so many dumbasses taking it as gospel fact. The only saving grace it possess is it's an aggregator of source material - usually. Those "external references" can be useful sometimes. But by the same token, you still need to analyse THOSE sources yourself, too. It's not like Wikipedia cares if the source used in the article is only a half-step better than the National Enquirer. They just want A source.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
It's fairly easy to pick holes in these postcard-sized theories when looking at more than one case study. You don't have to look too hard to find counter examples; companies that struggle for years, overcoming unsurmountable odds until they hit the big time.
You are right, it is too often used as a mantra, the silver bullet response. Just like ESSA, 'pick low-hanging fruit', 'buy, not build' and crap like that. And these bits of wisdom are crap, if you merely turn them into guiding dogmas.
One thing I've learned while working on innovative stuff is that the real trick isn't knowing to fail early, it's knowing how and when to do so. To fail early effectively you have to be able to recognise failure, or you'll end up keeping failure alive for too long, or perhaps prematurely kill a fledgling success. And when you do fail, don't just kill the project and bury it out back, learn from your failure.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
And if none of those work you can always give succeeding a shot
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Doesn't three failures break a Wikipedia rule somehow??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Not just fail over and over again. Its now whether you fail but how you deal with failure. Learning from your failures means you wont make
the same mistakes, youll make brand new ones, but youll learn from those too.
I'm glad, he is finally making money hand over fist from Wikipedia — a business success like no other.
Oh, wait...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I have started and ran a few biz with various success and a few total wrecks over the years. I totally agree with being able to put a bad idea down fast, in a don't throw 'good money after bad' sense.
I recall reading some stat or quote years ago about how only 1 in 7 new biz make it. So, I needed to start a new biz fast, but could not afford to fail at it for lack of money to anything else. So, I started 7 different ones all at once. 3 of them where complete dogs, and I shut them down in the first couple of month. 1 made money and showed promise, but was just no fun. So I killed that. I was left with 3 working and making money two years later. I killed one that took too much of my time, relative to the money. One took off and has made real money, and the other one is still alive and kicking but takes almost no resources.
Living in Chile
...didn't stymie Louie Pasteur!
(No, sir!)
Edison took years to see the light!
(Right!)
Alexander Graham knew failure well
'E took a lot o' knocks to ring that Bell!
If success simply means getting lots of hits, then yes - I suppose Wikipedia is a success. However if success means earning a living and being rewarded for your efforts, then I guess wikipedia does provide some of that, but is it in proportion to it's internet popularity? No. Now, I appreciate that it's a non-profit organisation and all, but it's hard to turn something that's free into a failure. A better example of success would be to look at something where the users have to pay for the service they get. In that case, almost every internet project is a failure: Wiki, Facebook, Google, Twitter. None of these have succeeded at directly extracting cash from their users. They all rely on either having an independently wealthy sponsor who doesn't mind losing a few $Bn or they push advertising in our faces and make their money from that.
None of them succeed in getting money from users. Just about the only internet (financial) success stories are the gaming sites.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The parent is right and should have mentioned that the comparison has been made by no other than the journal Nature.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html
(unfortunately, not full article, another reason to appreciate community efforts like Wikipedia)
Encyclopedia Britannica protested publicly and asked Nature to retract itself.
Nature said OK, we will check our facts again. They did so and confirmed their original results.
I am not surprised to see comments like those of the grandparents reappear. What I find worrisome is to see that they get modded insightful.
Wikipedia is accessible everywhere in the world, to billions (I am tempted to write "billions and billions"...) of people.
It is a game changing accomplishment.
TED: Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia (20m).
Fail early and fail often! erh wait ??? release early release often!!! ....
Well if you have the capital, e.g. GM or Exxon it can work. It worked for Morgan, Carnegie, MS and others. Let the others take the risk then buy the ones most likely to succeed. That was the GM model and it worked for almost a century. All the brands they had; Pontiac, Chevy, and Buick for example; were all independent companies before being bought out.
In the oil patch the big boys will watch a play and then assimilate the companies they think have the most potential. If a company they spin it off or shut it down. Nothing personal, it's just business.
BTW, in my opinion Ford is to GM as Apple is to MS.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Wikipedia has learn nothing from nupedia, all these citation needed trollism is asking agin for the experts opinion, hence, nupedia all again.
-Woof woof woof!
I've run my own business and for too long a period of time I brokered businesses. From my brokering experience I took away a number of lessons, but the outstanding rule of thumb I took away was that, on average, a business that fails and goes into a fire sale mode will realize ~10% on the costs undertaken in setting the business up. Failure is expensive. The costs are at best a tax write off.
Failure is one of the most underrated means to success. Because failure is expensive two key attendant details should be kept in mind. You have to be able to pull the plug and, as time is money, timing is crucial. Good planning in the initial stages of the business should include an exit strategy and the better the ground work done in laying out a business plan the better positioned one would be to pull the plug in a timely fashion. The second aspect seems to be culturally blighted. Failure, whether in school, on the playground, in social affairs or business is stupidly branded as a social stain. We necessarily succeed by learning from our failures and getting it right the next time, but, in order to progress, we need to be able to learn as much as possible from our failures. Going back to the earlier point, the better the business plan going into the venture, the better the lessons that can be taken from failure. Also there are relative gains from a business failure. You can salvage and even enhance resources including things like financing sources and heighten your exposure in a wider community.
ideopath @ play
...except in this case "anyone" means "a small cabal of editors with all the time to spend guarding their pet pages against edits submitted by the likes of filthy scoundrels such as you".
I like the concept of wikipedia and all but let's stop kidding ourselves. The site stopped being editable by all a few years back. Good luck trying to edit any existing pages because your edits will be rolled back faster than you can hit refresh.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My girlfriend designed the logo for Nupedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia She got an official t-shirt out of it. It's probably worth a fortune, maybe even $20.00, on eBay now.
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
It is a hell of an accomplishment, but worth clarifying - the Nature study references science articles, not all articles.
http://tedxtampabay.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/the-positives-of-failure/
Failure is pretty normal. So is quitting after failure. But if you're able to move on and keep trying, then you may succeed. Once you succeed usually you continue with that success. Of course you may go on to try other things which may either fail of succeed.
Have you heard people mention finding what they were looking for in the "last place that they looked"?
Does it ever happen otherwise? Do you often find yourself finding what you're looking for then continuing to search yet more locations to see if it's there?
This comment is entirely truthful. Since it can't be backupped by something posted on the internet. It must be a lie.
Heh, How am I doing summarizing wikipedia?
I've tried 4 web ventures also without success. Does this mean I'm due? Sites that depend on "the network effect" seem especially difficult. The network effect means that you need a sufficient number of both consumers and contributors (such as buyers and sellers) before it holds it's own. My earliest ventures were like this.
Later I focused on specialized niches and found more promising results (although not promising enough to be self-sustaining). People looking for something specific are more likely to use your service or product even if it's not popular (yet).
Sites that rely on the network effect, such as FaceBook and WikiPedia, have become the most popular of web places. But they also are more likely to fail, and thus are a bigger gamble. I'm not saying don't try those, only that your risk/reward profile is much steeper.
For a (silly) fishing analogy, you have to decide whether to use bait targeted for a typical 12-inch fish and have a reasonable shot at getting something, or go for the glory of the Big Cahoona but with a marginal chance.
Now I'm tinkering around with open-source projects instead of web-sites. I don't know about its fishing seas yet. I don't expect money, but maybe some geek bragging rights/fame if all goes well. Live and learn...
Table-ized A.I.
So slashdot's CSS is entrepreneurial, eh? ;-)
I think what these 'successful' people are saying is, "Look, I didn't do anything different in the times when I failed or succeeded. It looked like a good idea, I worked very hard, and nothing came of it.
Well, that's the way things actually work out in life. It also works the other way. My father, who left Reading University in 1959 with a degree in horticulture made a tremendous success of his career just (as he says) by "happening to be in the right place at the right time". Now I'm in my late 40s, I sometimes wish I could say the same, but then (a) I would have missed out on a load of cool things going down and (b) to be truthful, I lack his capacity for sheer dogged application.
This type of anecdotal philosophy is useless. It is the equivalent of asking a 100 year old man what the secret to his long life was. The answer is never, "Well, I just happened to be a couple of sigma away from the mean in the normal distribution of human longevity". It is always like "get up early every morning, smoke a cigar every night, drink a pint of whiskey every day, etc."
For every anecdote there is an equal and opposite anecdote. It's like a law or something. What about the tale of Bruce and the Spider, where the King of Scotland is inspired by a spider after losing to the Brits six times to go out and try again? According to Jimmy Wales, the King should have packed it in after one or two.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
Don't throw good money after bad.
etc.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Prediction: 20 percent of all the mass market business books written in the next three years will mention Jimmy Wales and his three prior failures, with varying amounts of journalistic detail.
"Fail fast" is an old idea. But it works best the smaller the company is, otherwise big company politics and shareholder pressure come into play.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KoPYFxu-8w
TEDxTampaBay-JimmyWales-021210
Winston Churchill is quoted as saying "Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
...Which is particularly appropriate given that prior to the onset of WWII Churchill was pretty much a washed-up old soak. But (whatever else one may think about him) he was certainly formidable as a war-time leader.
Well, it really depends on your point of view and what you define as the "King of Scotland" and what you define as "the Brits".
If, for example, you define the "King of Scotland" as Wales and any single attempt as "the Brits", you may well have a point. But if you define "successful website" as "the Brits", then Wales's experience matches very well.
If we were to expand upon this, I'm pretty sure that the King of Scotland didn't attack the Brits exactly the same way each time. He tried different ways (lunch site, chinese hack spawn, nupedia) to defeat the Brits until he succeeded.
The
Players of the game of Go have a proverb "Lose your first fifty games as quickly as possible".
Fail cheap. This might be derived from 'fail early' as time is money. But this is the third optional part you'll hear from investors and businessmen.
Right. This is something the better venture capitalists used to keep in mind. As a group, venture capitalists have lost money since 2000, because there's too much venture capital available and companies are running too long on VC money. (Much VC money is dumb money now. Too much money is desperately looking for decent yields in a period when no investment is doing well.)
Venture capital in Silicon Valley used to be about technology. Someone would propose building a thing, and would get VC funding to build a prototype. Either it worked, or it didn't. If it failed, the VCs were out the cost of building a prototype. If it worked, there was a potential business. The failure rate was about 9 out of 10, and a win meant a 10 to 100x profit.
As semiconductor, electronics, and software technology matured, startups tended to be business concepts rather than technology concepts. So they had to be brought to the point of having a sizable user base before it was clear whether they'd succeed or fail. This led to the first dot-com boom. In that boom, it was possible to take companies public early, and the VCs could often cash out before the business failed. (I used to track this; see Downside's Deathwatch, where "chart is not available for this symbol" isn't a bug; it means the company is gone and forgotten.)
In the second dot-com boom ("Web 2.0"), investors weren't willing to pay for untried companies. So Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace are still running on VC money. Myspace could have gone public a few years ago, but it's too late now. Adult Friendfinder tried to go public last week, but just gave up.
Wales' business, Wikia, is in that category - VC-funded, losing money, and lacking an exit strategy. The problem is that VCs looked at Wales' success with Wikipedia, which is a nonprofit, and thought that would translate into business success. It didn't. They should have looked at his unbroken string of business failures.
VC-funded companies don't always succeed or fail. There's a third option, and it's the most common - the "zombie" company. The company makes enough money to cover its expenses, but not enough to pay back its investors. This is, in fact, the most common outcome. VCs usually have a stable of zombies they're trying to sell to somebody, anybody, just to get them off the books. They usually end up being sold to some big player in the same field at a huge discount.
[Disclaimer for US Americans: If you confuse my argumentation with that of creationist retards, you definitely misunderstood me. I understand why. Because they misuse arguments such as these for their base motives. As you see below, I go very much against them. So don’t let them pull everything in the dirt that they touch, and don’t fall for a knee-jerk reaction. :)]
His biggest failure was a basic architectural assumption of Wikipedia. The assumption of “the one global truth(iness)”.
This caused him to make Wikipedia a centralized and centrally controlled site, instead of a P2P system.
Of course this was based on very good intentions, and originally not a problem, since everyone could edit everything. Because with those assumptions, how could there ever be two people disagreeing with each other? Ever? ;))
Naturally there were people who disagreed. And naturally they found the one main reason why one can only theoretically but not realistically assume a global truth: Because sometimes it is simply impossible to find out which view is really true. E.g. because no one of them got a time machine handy, to fly back into the past, and see for himself. Or because resolving it with quantum physics is not yet possible without calculations taking anything less than billions of years. And because of course in physics, everything is defined relative to other things.
But even this could have been resolved by educated people with a knowledge of physics and logic, trough simply stating what it proven to what level (e.g. an experiment, a video clip, just a theory, just speculation), and leaving the side-taking with the cavemen.
Unfortunately there are people, that are unable to discuss things reasonably. (E.g. aforementioned religious fundamentalists.)
So the idea of one global truth had to die. But what replaced it, was even worse: The people who control Wikipedia started to just accuse everybody who disagreed, of being unable to discuss things reasonably, and the deletion and flame wars started.
This is the sad state that Wikipedia is in now. Everything is controlled, approved, and doubly approved. By a group of people who sometimes just don’t know what they are even talking about.
See, the point of a P2P Wikipedia would not have been, to make every crazy bullshit out there equal. But to give them there own sandbox, way away from us, where they could play, and not disturb us. Like Conservapedia: It does no harm, even though it is out there, because everybody knows how silly it is, and just laughs at it.
Wales hat very good intentions and a great idea. But he was waay deep in treehugger happy happy imaginationland with some of those descisions. And I also was there with him for some time. Until I took a harder look at reality. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Wales didn't found found Wikipedia alone, though he does his damnedest convince the world that he did. He's just a typical douchbag marketing businessman who wants to take all the credit for the work of others.
The article is wildly inaccurate on the subject of Nupedia. They say, "Then he tried an online encyclopedia called Newpedia, a free encyclopedia created by paid experts. He spent $250,000 for writers to make 12 articles. It failed."
They have the name wrong.
They portray it as Wales' project, when in fact it was more closely associated with Larry Sanger.
It wasn't written by paid experts. I believe Larry Sanger had a paid position as editor. I worked on an article for Nupedia, and I can assure you that they didn't offer me any money.
They make it sound like Nupedia commissioned 12 articles (at some price). Wow, I would have liked to be offered $20,000 to write an article! Actually 12 is just the number that got done (by people working for free) before they gave up and admitted Nupedia was a failure.
My own experience trying to write an article for them suggests two reasons why it failed: (1) The software to run it was mostly vaporware. Nothing worked. (2) It was no fun. I had a panel of people who were not experts in my field, and whom I had to satisfy in order to get the article accepted. That got old really fast. This is of course the exact opposite of WP's instant gratification philosophy. (Well, WP isn't so much like that today, because a newbie who comes in and tries to edit an article is likely to get his edit reverted without explanation. But that's how WP was in the initial barn-raising stage.)
Find free books.
I think the most plausible theory illustrated by this story is one that slave drivers came up with a long time ago. That is, if you want to succeed, free labor is a lot better than paid employees. I think he succeeded because he had a lot of people doing hard work for him, with nothing in return except maybe their name in some viewable log. I also think it helps if you can afford to spend money on a bunch of failures (one of which cost $250,000) and still afford to do another project. So if you're rich in the first place and you have free labor, then this article is certainly worth reading.
I sounds like Jimmy Wales is the secret genius behind Fox TV's programming, because they use his failure logic to cancel the awesome-but-undiscovered stuff all the time.
Thanks, Jimmy, for cancelling Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond, and Keen Eddie!
to dub him "Jimmy Fails"
cat
If everyone tossed a coin in the air half of the population would have heads and the other half would have tails.
After around thirty tosses, there would be one or two (a small number anyway) who had tossed thirty straight heads in a row.
That does not indicate that the person who did that is more intelligent or talented.
Start the whole thing over again and someone else will hit the jackpot, and the previous winner will likely go out at the first or second round.
Success in business is often like that. One big idea, and then, no matter how much they try, nothing else they come up with does as well again. Some appear to have serial success when in fact all that is happening is that the first huge success is simply subsidising what would otherwise have been serial failures. Rich businessmen sometimes get that subsidy from the banks (out of your savings).
It's not chance you say; it's talent and hard work. But that is chance. Being born to the right family, in the right place at the right time all come in to play.
Every self made millionaire is convinced that what they achieved is purely down to their ability... until it all goes pear shaped.
If you have had an idea, and your hard work has paid off, then thank your lucky stars.
So the ultimate incarnation I've heard of this is "Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap."
Pick two.
I was watching some documentary type TV show a few years ago, talking about some of the largest man-made structures ever built. One was a gigantic bridge over water. They interviewed one of the engineers, asking him how he was able to conceptualize something so massive, and successfully get it completed. He, matter-of-factly said, "It's really no different than building a much smaller bridge. Once you know the principles involved for building one, you just start multiplying everything and using a lot bigger parts."
I think that's probably true for most things, really. People get so "awestruck" by huge things, they sometimes forget that they were accomplished by people who just applied the same principles you'd apply to successfully do it on a much smaller scale, and scaled things up from there. So there isn't much of a valid reason to fear thinking big.
Could you please edit Wales' speech and add these important points? Thanks.
Wtf is this "truth" you are blabbering about? ;-)
Striving for verifyability, and citing sources, is the most sane thing Ive ever heard.. Striving for "truth", leave that to the dogmatic religious and wannabe-scientific people.
Why imprison your mind when you can be free? We'll just cite them all, and be free :-)
Compare to Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that the most successful people in business do not take big risks and in fact are very good at minimizing the downside of any venture:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/18/100118fa_fact_gladwell (subscription required)
Considering than Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia alternate between begging for money, and slapping around those same people with idiotic rules and many layers of bureaucracy that make improving WP impossible, I have to wonder if he isn't just setting himself up for his 4th failure. The largest and longest by-far.
I would be quite ironic if WP failed, while citizendium.org prospers.*
*CZ, for those who don't know, is the WP-like project of Larry Sanger, the WP co-founder you dare not talk about, because if you got paid any money, your employer gets to take not just the proceeds of your work, but 100% credit and mind-share for everything you accomplished... right Jimmy?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Roosevelt hated him. He thought Churchill was a drunk, and judged the entire UK mainland on that premise.
If Churchill was slightly more respectable, he may have enjoyed US involvement sooner. He certainly was left to enjoy being booted out of office the moment the war was over.