I love posts on business failures. Not because I enjoy seeing people fail, but because I’m always impressed by people who treat failure as an opportunity to learn/grow/focus.
When you’re at ground-zero in a new start-up, the fear of failure creeps into your mind quite a bit, so it was great to see the poster child of dot-com failure surface recently in an introspective post about her rise back from the Pets.co graveyard. Thanks to Niki Scevak over at Bronte Media for clueing me in (NYTimes coverage here).
Every start-up deals with the sock puppet to one degree or another, so it was great to see Julie’s come back. It reminded me that you need to surround yourself with people that handle failure well, especially in a start-up. I learned a long time ago from Brian that failure=opportunity when you work in a start-up. As we build out our new team, we need to continue to surround ourselves with people that share this view and don’t run for the hills or point fingers when the sock puppet makes a visit.
Unfortunately, I’ve never figured out a good sock puppet test in the interview context. Please let us know if you have one.
August 12th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Wow…incredible NYT article. Thanks for turning me onto it. I agree that failure can equal opportunity, but as Julie so eloquently noted in mistake #3, make sure you don’t stay in that fear of failure space for too long.
Perhaps you should ask interviewees what they plan on doing next if the company fails. My guess is that even the notion of failure will make some candidates “run for the hills”. The good hires will look at that as just part of the fun.