The culture of failure

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I love failure and I want to fail more. While looking at videos over at Stanford’s Entrepreneur’s corner, I stumbled upon one video from Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm. What he says is true of the valley, and of entrepreneurship in general; one must embrace failure. ‘Fail often, fail fast‘ is a mantra typically enunciated by startup types.

This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that execution is king and rapid iteration comes to mind. There is no point to wait on the perfect idea, the perfect plan. Does that imply that we should throw away the adage ‘Measure twice, cut once‘?  But does that mean that we have a free  license to push out a lot of crappy code? I think not.

Another rule of thumb I came across was ‘Be pessimistic in the short term, optimistic in the long term‘ which I think ties both ideas together.

The time to act is NOW. The best plan to execute is the one right NOW. Innovation is driven by failure. Success is a by-product of failure… or is it?