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Jimmy Wales' Theory of Failure

Posted by Soulskill on from the citation-needed dept.

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.'"

7 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Articles about failure being good... by N3tRunner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Articles about failure being good... by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      My work here is dung.
    2. Re:Articles about failure being good... by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. As a failed entrepreneur by OgreChow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:You know... by SpinyNorman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. Re:You have to LEARN from failure by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  5. Douchebag by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.