Slashdot Mirror
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.
If you're not failing 90% of the time, you're not tackling interesting enough problems.
It was aimed at academics, but it applies equally well to business.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If the majority of people are idiots, then probability dictates that you are likely an idiot, and we should ignore your opinion.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
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
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.
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.