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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 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 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.
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.
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.
...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.
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
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.