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.'"

Comments

Articles about failure being good...

[N3tRunner]

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.

Re:Articles about failure being good...

[eldavojohn]

Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.

No, successful people and companies keep failing. They just hide it. Look at Google. I've heard they give their employees a fifth of their time to work on their own project that doesn't have to have a customer. So, if that's true, you have to think of how many thousand projects are going on inside Google that never see the light of day. A few of them make it out but it's definitely the shotgun approach to success. Fire enough bullets at once and one of them is bound to hit your target ...

Successful people keep failing but they use their resources to expand and diversify what they are doing so that they can prune it down to look like their succeeding more often than not. Some companies just outright suck at it and will push a failure all the way to launch.

Thinking that successful people stop failing is a dangerous assumption. You don't get to the top and from that point on never suffer a setback or have to kill a project early because it's not working out. Knowing when to do that is what makes those successful people successful. Wales says it should be early and often.

Re:Articles about failure being good...

[lawpoop]

Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.

What you are saying here is that failure or success is more or less a choice, an activity you do. You could actually go out and succeed or fail, by sheer choice.

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. Then, on another project that had similar looking prospects to the failure, by chance it succeeded. So if you don't persist through failures, you will likely never see the success, which is more the case of 'fortune favors the prepared'."

Re:Articles about failure being good...

[brunes69]

People have a lot of misconceptions on the 20% time from Google.

- The 20% is not time to do whatever the heck you want. Basically it is time to spend on things that the company has not specifically directed you to work on. You have to justify the time with (what I believe are monthly( reports with your peers and supervisors on what you were working on.

- The project is not necessarily anything that would ever be customer facing. I would wager, given the type of employee Google hires, most of them would be actually internally directed projects - optimizations to search algorithms, research into new computer learning techniques or advertising techniques, improvements to storage mechanisms, etc. For all you know, nearly all 20% projects actually get used - only thing is only a small number of them are visible to end users.

Re:Articles about failure being good...

[JaredOfEuropa]

Or rather: "Don't be afraid to fail". My more entrepreneurial friends all have had several failures, but most decided to stick with trying out their new ideas. Some managed at some point to turn one of their ideas into small but successful businesses. On the other hand, I have had several ideas for a business, but I have never had the inclination, energy or guts to put any of them into practise, thinking "that idea isn't good enough...". In other words, afraid to fail.

Another thing to remember is: "don't be afraid to think big" (or fail big, perhaps). Apple, McDonalds, Google, Dell and others have grown from small enterprises into big corporations. Some of that is luck, being at the right place at the right time and all that, but not all of it. And there are many similar small successes that have failed to cross over into the big time, or failed to even try.

'Fail Often, Fail Early' Is Not Just Wales' Mantra

[eldavojohn]

This is a really old mantra in the business world that I was indoctrinated with when I partook in R&D for a Fortune 500 company.

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:

• Fail frequently. This can also be said "fail often" and simply means "accept a lot of failures."
• Fail early. Don't invest a lot of time into what you're failing at and just accept the failure and move on. Just as long as you don't get hung up failing all the time (like Wales said). Also have heard it said as "fail fast."
• 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.

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?"

As a failed entrepreneur

[OgreChow]

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.

Re:As a failed entrepreneur

[BigSlowTarget]

Bingo. To summarize: spend lots of other people's money.throwing crap at the wall as fast as you can until something sticks. Alternatively, be rich, dabble at things and have fun. Not really realistic advice for most people.

Re:You know...

[SpinyNorman]

Yes, and no ...

There's plenty of reasons to be suspect of WikiPedia, not least that officially it doesn't even strive for the truth - just for verifiyability (basically a published source).

However, there have been studies done showing that WikiPedia articles are on average just as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica ones - both have similar average numbers of errors per article.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html

Re:You have to LEARN from failure

[TheRaven64]

One of my favourite Alan Kay quotes applies to this article:

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.

the Journal Nature disagrees with you

[openfrog]

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.

And drink a pint of whiskey every day

[paiute]

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.

Douchebag

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

wildly inaccurate article

[bcrowell]

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.)