9 ms·

Permission to Fail

347 points by RKoutnik 11y ago

stephenitis 11y ago
I'm always delighted to see how open and touching blog posts by the Keen.io team can be. I wish more companies took to making their blogs more open to content such as this. Are there other good examples of companies that take on this ethos? Are there particular activities or strategies that make this kind of open writing more comfortable amongst a company?
defenestration 11y ago
'You don't have to do this.' ~ So true, and so easy to forget
dawnbreez 11y ago
This may be the most important lesson we can learn nowadays. Between demand for ever-higher test scores, and demand for ever-more-inoffensive worlds, and demand for ever-more perfect people, we forget that failure isn't game over.
neom 11y ago
Amazingly beautiful people, all of them. Love the Keen team and truly hope they find whatever success they are seeking. <3
cjcenizal 11y ago
Success can have a strange effect. It raises the bar for you. The merit of your accomplishments become relative to what you did yesterday. If you don't out-perform past results, you're failing. And if you're failing... then aren't you a failure? I think we forget that failure is the default state. Which redefines success to be making any attempt at all. Like Edison said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
- mudge 11y ago
  A person only fails when he/she stops trying.
  - vitd 11y ago
    I get what you mean, but I feel like sometimes it's important to just stop if you're repeatedly failing at something. I often find that taking a break (stopping trying for a bit) gives my subconscious time to breathe and figure out what my conscious brain couldn't.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Have you actually found that to be a useful thing to believe -- "I'm a success as long as I can get out of bed...?"
- stuartaxelowen 11y ago
  From Andre 3000: "Baby boy you're only funky as your last cut, you focus on the past your ass'll be a has what"
  - matwood 11y ago
    From Jay-Z..."Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first"
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      The intro on that song is even better; it's a Biggie sample from an unpublished 1996 interview [some "like"s omitted]: "Puff [Daddy] told me, the key to this joint, the key to staying on top of things, is treat everything like it's your first project, nomsayin'. Like it's your first day back when you was an intern. That's how you try to treat things, just stay hungry."
cushychicken 11y ago
It's so nice to see some humanity out of the startup community every once in a while. It gets so old and, dare I say, fake, to see everyone making a big show of how they're killing it all the time. That's not real life. This is.
avitzurel 11y ago
"Companies" tend to be this faceless creature. You saw one you saw them all. Posts like this make companies about the people, as it should. Open atmosphere outside the company leads to open atmosphere inside the company and the other way around. If you talk about the failures inside the company it makes people connect, it makes them understand what you are about, maybe this random engineer or QA guy/gal will have the idea to push you through? Companies love to share big number, new clients, no one ever shares challenges and bad things happening. In this VC run world you are running scared that it will say something about you. Great post. Kudos to the Keen team.
- JohnHammersley 11y ago
  This is such an important point, and it's very easy to overlook the internal comms (whilst all the while being open and personable to the outside). One thing that really, really helped us was our angel investors asking for a monthly update. They were very hands off, but just wanted to be kept in the loop about what was going on. Aside from it taking a while to get out of the habit of 'putting off sending the email until the next big piece of company news was out' (which is never a good idea), it was amazing to see the different reactions to sending them a very personal, informal email with updates not only about the company but about the team as well, rather than just a fact / numbers based 'company update'. I'm sure this is obvious to anyone on the outside, but it's so easy to miss the internal stuff when you're growing (both traction and team). I highly recommend that anyone starting a business finds someone they trust (investor or not) with whom they can send such a monthly update. Not only will it help put things in perspective, it's good practice for when it's necessary to write ones to the team like this one from Keen.
  - avitzurel 11y ago
    Not discussing the bad things has the opposite effect of what people think. Most employees know that something not good is going with the company. Not discussing it makes people wonder if it's bad or worse. If I was looking for a new job, I would apply to Keen right now, saying "Hey, I think I can help here...". As an employee inside the company I would be extra creative and incentivized to make sure everything I do has an impact.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mwetzler 11y ago
Hi there. Thanks for reading my piece. I was delighted when one of my teammates informed it was trending on HN today. Then I noticed there were 7 comments and I got pretty anxious. I was nearly too afraid to click and read them. But now that I'm here, wow, I don't know what to say. I'm tearing up, flooded with relief, filled with gratitude that people seem to understand not only I what I was trying to say, but a little bit of what we are trying to do with Keen. Thank you. It's probably an overshare, but this is one of the first things I've published since returning from maternity leave. I was feeling more vulnerable than usual, and the support from the community means a lot to me personally. Thanks again.
- JohnHammersley 11y ago
  Congratulations on your new arrival! Ours is ten weeks old today and it certainly adds a different kind of stress / happiness to just about everything! :) I've just posted a longer reply to one of the other comments on here, and so to keep this one brief, hats off to you for writing this and posting it, it's so important (and hard) to get these types of internal comms right. Our angel investors were great for helping remind us of the benefits of being more open internally. Good luck for 2016!
- avitzurel 11y ago
  I commented in this thread as well... continued... You are awesome! We had our 3rd 4 months ago, dealing with this right after being back. Kudos to you. Seriously. In this day and age that everything is so disconnected and artificial, it's just a delight to read something like that.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  May I add my Congrats on the new addition as well (ours is six weeks now). Also, thank you for the post - it's high time we remembered an Enterprise used to be a single goal, a time limited quest that brought people together and then disbanded them. We should out live our organisations - and they should serve us. Not the other way round. Good luck.
doug1001 11y ago
""Still, I appreciate this time to reflect when our confidence is shaken a bit. To be honest, we were probably overdue for it." probably the best thing from a CEO i have ever read. That said, the bar's not terribly high--depending on the CEO, or their mood, or the circumstances, "all hands memos" are nearly always (in my experience) tirelessly optimistic propaganda with no regard for the data, or just the opposite, i.e., "sure we're doing great, but we'd be doing twice as good if you lazy bastards would stop screwing off!" This CEO actually had the courage to send to everyone, a snapshot of their thoughts at that moment. I doubt they teach this in MBA school.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  I believe Michelle is one of the earliest employees, but she's not the CEO or a founder.
  - doug1001 11y ago
    thanks for the correction--and looking at the Post again, nowhere does it say or suggest she's the CEO nor anything else about her job title. It was just my incorrect assumption based on the content of the memo
tomcam 11y ago
Looks like I have to play bad cop here. I appreciate the openness, but as a potential customer... not so much. Because while sentences like this are kind of inspiring: Instead, let’s give ourselves permission to fail. ... And you know what? It’s okay if we’re not. If Keen busts, we’ll all find new grand adventures. As a (no longer) potential customer, they clash harshly with this one: In last week’s outage, we had our first major data loss in over 12 months. Because you know what? When I trust you with my money and my company's data, I don't want those precious assets to be with someone who's been given permission to fail. I really do want it to be someone who tells the troops this: "Let’s double-down, work through the weekend, push through the issues, get ‘er done, rally!" The issue to me is public declarations vs private thoughts. There is absolutely nothing wrong with waking up covered in flop sweat, wondering if you're destroyed your business and the job situations of people you genuinely like and appreciate. However, I've found that a good part of leadership is, in fact, shutting the hell up when "routine" bad things are happening because too much openness can stress out employees. By "routine" I mean pretty much anything other than the certain death of the company, at which time they deserve reasonably early notice).
- maldeh 11y ago
  I feel like you are getting distracted by the sound bite. This post is not about telling employees that it's okay for them to do mediocre work - it's about having a healthy perspective about their jobs and not getting emotionally entangled with failures. Rationally, this should always lead to better outcomes, aggregated over a large number of employees and personality types. Working on one of these double-down-rally type companies myself, I can say that all you would have to show for it after sufficient time is burnout and mental exhaustion. You seldom feel like you are doing your best work when you're in crunch mode all the time. As to expecting companies to keep private thoughts to themselves, and maintaining a different public front - are you really better off paying money to a company where the staff could riot and quit at the wrong time, as opposed to one where they ask you to manage expectations more realistically? But this does inform why leadership and PR so rarely attempt to reach out to the public with honesty and frankness. Without critical reading, a lot of people simply "take it the wrong way", and the wrong kind of misapprehension can do significant damage to their public image.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
This. What she is really saying is that she has permission to fail the customers who trusted her. We achieve success by being given a position of trust by people who depend on us. She is unilaterally demanding the right to betray that trust in order to have both the benefits of success, and also the easy lifestyle of someone who is just a worker bee. This idea that everyone deserves an easy lifestyle, regardless of their position, is one that needs to die. Marissa Mayer and her ultra short maternity leaves gets it. This lady does not.
- maldeh 11y ago
  > What she is really saying is that she has permission to fail the customers who trusted her. No she really isn't. > She is unilaterally demanding the right to betray that trust in order to have both the benefits of success, and also the easy lifestyle of someone who is just a worker bee. This is baseless. She is giving herself permission to not be wracked with guilt, beat herself up about it endlessly, and put herself through self-imposed torture if she fails. It makes sense not to snowball over and compound your failures by piling on. Nobody is advocating screwing customers over by default. > This idea that everyone deserves an easy lifestyle, regardless of their position, is one that needs to die. Kind of extreme? > Marissa Mayer and her ultra short maternity leaves gets it. This lady does not. ...
  - mystikal 11y ago
    Besides, our system of corporate loans and bankruptcy works so well to encourage innovation precisely because it minimizes the personal cost of failure. If you weren't allowed to fail, nobody would take risks.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    No one is saying she should compound her failures. I'm saying she should either be willing to do what it takes to fix them or she should step aside for someone who is willing. The idea of screwing customers "by default" is exactly what she advocates doing. By default services will break and she is giving herself permission to leave them broken.
papercruncher 11y ago
I was one of those affected by the mentioned data loss and inconsistency issues. Even though I kept backups, I was fairly annoyed at the time, but now I'm glad to see they moved past it and things are stable.
lquist 11y ago
I have to disagree with the formulation of your advice. I totally agree that you should give yourself permission to fail, but I think it's important that this is only in the short term. In the long term, you can never give up (this does not mean that you shouldn't be flexible and pivot). As PG says, "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." (http://paulgraham.com/die.html http://paulgraham.com/die.html)
USNetizen 11y ago
After seeing more and more of these "we failed" pieces pop up here, I commend the authors for sharing something so intimate. However, these are starting to strike me as those "everyone gets a trophy" competitions where the goal is sharing the best failure stories and getting a reaffirming pat on the back for things going wrong. I'm of the supposed generation that is labeled with this "we're all winners regardless of what place we finish in the race" mentality, but I don't get it. This is where that stereotype comes from. This is perfectly exemplified by the "if Keen busts...we'll move on" wording that is pervasive in this. Nevermind the amounts of time, effort and (other people's) money that went into building something, and the jobs and families that count on a paycheck. The whole "we'll just pat ourselves on the back and move on" way of doing business forgets that there are victims and potentially long-reaching impacts for every failure. It can't be that simple and easy to walk away, it really shouldn't be. People fail, startups fail, etc. all the time. But it's starting to sound like a competition to see who failed the best the more of these I read. It just seems like attention-seeking behavior sometimes, or maybe just slick marketing perhaps to try and boost that falling revenue. Who knows. I mean, it made it to the top of HN, right? Probably got a few thousand eyeballs out of that at the very least for free. On the other hand, posting about failure and turmoil for a going business concern can't be good for customer retention. If I were a competitor, I'd jump all over this opportunity to lure some of those lucrative clients away by leveraging the fear of investing their time, money and effort into a potentially problem-riddled organization that by-and-large accepts, even embraces, a high rate of failure. Large enterprises don't like hearing about these types of problems with their vendors as they are inherently quite risk averse. Ultimately, I fear that this company, and others that have done the same, will soon realize this but it'll too late to save themselves from a flight of customers. Hey, who knows, prove me wrong. Anyway, just my opinion. I'm not trying to be negative, but just relaying a different perspective from someone who's been around the industry for some time.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  In hard times, there's a balance of concern between totally uninvested and stressed out of one's mind. In circumstances like the ones described, most people tend toward the latter. As an employee, this would be very welcome and probably very helpful in making the most of the situation. That said, it's crazy that they posted it for their customers to read. Hearing that my vendor has a "can fail" attitude isn't reassuring. I'd rather hear that my vendor is comprised of low-maintenance caffeine fueled super robots that keep their commitments with the stubbornness of a thousand donkeys. (I know they're probably not, but when choosing vendors, I'm usually working with limited info.) So...cool memo, weird post, nice thoughts.
ianamartin 11y ago
I think the naming of things comes in to play here a little bit. I think this piece would not have attracted the negativity it has here if it were entitled something a bit different, and I think, truer to the intent: Permission to be Human. Edited to add: I do very much appreciate that you wrote this and made it public. I think there's an empathy in your voice that's sorely lacking in the industry.
djsumdog 11y ago
Sites seems down. Mirror?
steinsgate 11y ago
I have also struggled with the same problem in the past: I couldn't stop obsessing about my work. I worked like a maniac. I expected the team to do the same, and drove them to the edge. We burned out after a while. At that point, I realized that startups are probably not for me. While I can work like a maniac, I don't like the effect it has on my well being. At that point I decided, I would rather go for small businesses, where the stress level is much lower and things are chill. The difference between a startup and a small business is outlined rather well in this Medium post. https://medium.com/swlh/you-think-you-re-a-startup-but-you-re-really-a-small-business-and-that-s-totally-cool-too-cd45ff80e6be#.rauyfyqpp https://medium.com/swlh/you-think-you-re-a-startup-but-you-r...
tedmiston 11y ago
Last month my startup closed our B round, led by Intel. While the change in pressure is a much smaller magnitude than what you're dealing with, for us the second-guessing is definitely stronger now. We analyze what we do more and question a lot of the things we spend time on. I knew there'd be more pressure, but I wasn't expecting such a sweeping wave.

347 points by RKoutnik 11y ago

I'm always delighted to see how open and touching blog posts by the Keen.io team can be. I wish more companies took to making their blogs more open to content such as this. Are there other good examples of companies that take on this ethos? Are there particular activities or strategies that make this kind of open writing more comfortable amongst a company?

defenestration 11y ago

'You don't have to do this.' ~ So true, and so easy to forget

dawnbreez 11y ago

This may be the most important lesson we can learn nowadays. Between demand for ever-higher test scores, and demand for ever-more-inoffensive worlds, and demand for ever-more perfect people, we forget that failure isn't game over.

neom 11y ago

Amazingly beautiful people, all of them. Love the Keen team and truly hope they find whatever success they are seeking. <3

cjcenizal 11y ago

Success can have a strange effect. It raises the bar for you. The merit of your accomplishments become relative to what you did yesterday. If you don't out-perform past results, you're failing. And if you're failing... then aren't you a failure? I think we forget that failure is the default state. Which redefines success to be making any attempt at all. Like Edison said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

mudge 11y ago
A person only fails when he/she stops trying.
- vitd 11y ago
  I get what you mean, but I feel like sometimes it's important to just stop if you're repeatedly failing at something. I often find that taking a break (stopping trying for a bit) gives my subconscious time to breathe and figure out what my conscious brain couldn't.
- Retra 11y ago
  Have you actually found that to be a useful thing to believe -- "I'm a success as long as I can get out of bed...?"
stuartaxelowen 11y ago
From Andre 3000: "Baby boy you're only funky as your last cut, you focus on the past your ass'll be a has what"
- matwood 11y ago
  From Jay-Z..."Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first"
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    The intro on that song is even better; it's a Biggie sample from an unpublished 1996 interview [some "like"s omitted]: "Puff [Daddy] told me, the key to this joint, the key to staying on top of things, is treat everything like it's your first project, nomsayin'. Like it's your first day back when you was an intern. That's how you try to treat things, just stay hungry."

cushychicken 11y ago

It's so nice to see some humanity out of the startup community every once in a while. It gets so old and, dare I say, fake, to see everyone making a big show of how they're killing it all the time. That's not real life. This is.

avitzurel 11y ago

"Companies" tend to be this faceless creature. You saw one you saw them all. Posts like this make companies about the people, as it should. Open atmosphere outside the company leads to open atmosphere inside the company and the other way around. If you talk about the failures inside the company it makes people connect, it makes them understand what you are about, maybe this random engineer or QA guy/gal will have the idea to push you through? Companies love to share big number, new clients, no one ever shares challenges and bad things happening. In this VC run world you are running scared that it will say something about you. Great post. Kudos to the Keen team.

JohnHammersley 11y ago
This is such an important point, and it's very easy to overlook the internal comms (whilst all the while being open and personable to the outside). One thing that really, really helped us was our angel investors asking for a monthly update. They were very hands off, but just wanted to be kept in the loop about what was going on. Aside from it taking a while to get out of the habit of 'putting off sending the email until the next big piece of company news was out' (which is never a good idea), it was amazing to see the different reactions to sending them a very personal, informal email with updates not only about the company but about the team as well, rather than just a fact / numbers based 'company update'. I'm sure this is obvious to anyone on the outside, but it's so easy to miss the internal stuff when you're growing (both traction and team). I highly recommend that anyone starting a business finds someone they trust (investor or not) with whom they can send such a monthly update. Not only will it help put things in perspective, it's good practice for when it's necessary to write ones to the team like this one from Keen.
- avitzurel 11y ago
  Not discussing the bad things has the opposite effect of what people think. Most employees know that something not good is going with the company. Not discussing it makes people wonder if it's bad or worse. If I was looking for a new job, I would apply to Keen right now, saying "Hey, I think I can help here...". As an employee inside the company I would be extra creative and incentivized to make sure everything I do has an impact.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mwetzler 11y ago

Hi there. Thanks for reading my piece. I was delighted when one of my teammates informed it was trending on HN today. Then I noticed there were 7 comments and I got pretty anxious. I was nearly too afraid to click and read them. But now that I'm here, wow, I don't know what to say. I'm tearing up, flooded with relief, filled with gratitude that people seem to understand not only I what I was trying to say, but a little bit of what we are trying to do with Keen. Thank you. It's probably an overshare, but this is one of the first things I've published since returning from maternity leave. I was feeling more vulnerable than usual, and the support from the community means a lot to me personally. Thanks again.

JohnHammersley 11y ago
Congratulations on your new arrival! Ours is ten weeks old today and it certainly adds a different kind of stress / happiness to just about everything! :) I've just posted a longer reply to one of the other comments on here, and so to keep this one brief, hats off to you for writing this and posting it, it's so important (and hard) to get these types of internal comms right. Our angel investors were great for helping remind us of the benefits of being more open internally. Good luck for 2016!
avitzurel 11y ago
I commented in this thread as well... continued... You are awesome! We had our 3rd 4 months ago, dealing with this right after being back. Kudos to you. Seriously. In this day and age that everything is so disconnected and artificial, it's just a delight to read something like that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
May I add my Congrats on the new addition as well (ours is six weeks now). Also, thank you for the post - it's high time we remembered an Enterprise used to be a single goal, a time limited quest that brought people together and then disbanded them. We should out live our organisations - and they should serve us. Not the other way round. Good luck.

doug1001 11y ago

""Still, I appreciate this time to reflect when our confidence is shaken a bit. To be honest, we were probably overdue for it." probably the best thing from a CEO i have ever read. That said, the bar's not terribly high--depending on the CEO, or their mood, or the circumstances, "all hands memos" are nearly always (in my experience) tirelessly optimistic propaganda with no regard for the data, or just the opposite, i.e., "sure we're doing great, but we'd be doing twice as good if you lazy bastards would stop screwing off!" This CEO actually had the courage to send to everyone, a snapshot of their thoughts at that moment. I doubt they teach this in MBA school.

tedmiston 11y ago
I believe Michelle is one of the earliest employees, but she's not the CEO or a founder.
- doug1001 11y ago
  thanks for the correction--and looking at the Post again, nowhere does it say or suggest she's the CEO nor anything else about her job title. It was just my incorrect assumption based on the content of the memo

tomcam 11y ago

Looks like I have to play bad cop here. I appreciate the openness, but as a potential customer... not so much. Because while sentences like this are kind of inspiring: Instead, let’s give ourselves permission to fail. ... And you know what? It’s okay if we’re not. If Keen busts, we’ll all find new grand adventures. As a (no longer) potential customer, they clash harshly with this one: In last week’s outage, we had our first major data loss in over 12 months. Because you know what? When I trust you with my money and my company's data, I don't want those precious assets to be with someone who's been given permission to fail. I really do want it to be someone who tells the troops this: "Let’s double-down, work through the weekend, push through the issues, get ‘er done, rally!" The issue to me is public declarations vs private thoughts. There is absolutely nothing wrong with waking up covered in flop sweat, wondering if you're destroyed your business and the job situations of people you genuinely like and appreciate. However, I've found that a good part of leadership is, in fact, shutting the hell up when "routine" bad things are happening because too much openness can stress out employees. By "routine" I mean pretty much anything other than the certain death of the company, at which time they deserve reasonably early notice).

maldeh 11y ago
I feel like you are getting distracted by the sound bite. This post is not about telling employees that it's okay for them to do mediocre work - it's about having a healthy perspective about their jobs and not getting emotionally entangled with failures. Rationally, this should always lead to better outcomes, aggregated over a large number of employees and personality types. Working on one of these double-down-rally type companies myself, I can say that all you would have to show for it after sufficient time is burnout and mental exhaustion. You seldom feel like you are doing your best work when you're in crunch mode all the time. As to expecting companies to keep private thoughts to themselves, and maintaining a different public front - are you really better off paying money to a company where the staff could riot and quit at the wrong time, as opposed to one where they ask you to manage expectations more realistically? But this does inform why leadership and PR so rarely attempt to reach out to the public with honesty and frankness. Without critical reading, a lot of people simply "take it the wrong way", and the wrong kind of misapprehension can do significant damage to their public image.

yummyfajitas 11y ago

This. What she is really saying is that she has permission to fail the customers who trusted her. We achieve success by being given a position of trust by people who depend on us. She is unilaterally demanding the right to betray that trust in order to have both the benefits of success, and also the easy lifestyle of someone who is just a worker bee. This idea that everyone deserves an easy lifestyle, regardless of their position, is one that needs to die. Marissa Mayer and her ultra short maternity leaves gets it. This lady does not.

maldeh 11y ago
> What she is really saying is that she has permission to fail the customers who trusted her. No she really isn't. > She is unilaterally demanding the right to betray that trust in order to have both the benefits of success, and also the easy lifestyle of someone who is just a worker bee. This is baseless. She is giving herself permission to not be wracked with guilt, beat herself up about it endlessly, and put herself through self-imposed torture if she fails. It makes sense not to snowball over and compound your failures by piling on. Nobody is advocating screwing customers over by default. > This idea that everyone deserves an easy lifestyle, regardless of their position, is one that needs to die. Kind of extreme? > Marissa Mayer and her ultra short maternity leaves gets it. This lady does not. ...
- mystikal 11y ago
  Besides, our system of corporate loans and bankruptcy works so well to encourage innovation precisely because it minimizes the personal cost of failure. If you weren't allowed to fail, nobody would take risks.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  No one is saying she should compound her failures. I'm saying she should either be willing to do what it takes to fix them or she should step aside for someone who is willing. The idea of screwing customers "by default" is exactly what she advocates doing. By default services will break and she is giving herself permission to leave them broken.

papercruncher 11y ago

I was one of those affected by the mentioned data loss and inconsistency issues. Even though I kept backups, I was fairly annoyed at the time, but now I'm glad to see they moved past it and things are stable.

lquist 11y ago

I have to disagree with the formulation of your advice. I totally agree that you should give yourself permission to fail, but I think it's important that this is only in the short term. In the long term, you can never give up (this does not mean that you shouldn't be flexible and pivot). As PG says, "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." (http://paulgraham.com/die.html http://paulgraham.com/die.html)

USNetizen 11y ago

After seeing more and more of these "we failed" pieces pop up here, I commend the authors for sharing something so intimate. However, these are starting to strike me as those "everyone gets a trophy" competitions where the goal is sharing the best failure stories and getting a reaffirming pat on the back for things going wrong. I'm of the supposed generation that is labeled with this "we're all winners regardless of what place we finish in the race" mentality, but I don't get it. This is where that stereotype comes from. This is perfectly exemplified by the "if Keen busts...we'll move on" wording that is pervasive in this. Nevermind the amounts of time, effort and (other people's) money that went into building something, and the jobs and families that count on a paycheck. The whole "we'll just pat ourselves on the back and move on" way of doing business forgets that there are victims and potentially long-reaching impacts for every failure. It can't be that simple and easy to walk away, it really shouldn't be. People fail, startups fail, etc. all the time. But it's starting to sound like a competition to see who failed the best the more of these I read. It just seems like attention-seeking behavior sometimes, or maybe just slick marketing perhaps to try and boost that falling revenue. Who knows. I mean, it made it to the top of HN, right? Probably got a few thousand eyeballs out of that at the very least for free. On the other hand, posting about failure and turmoil for a going business concern can't be good for customer retention. If I were a competitor, I'd jump all over this opportunity to lure some of those lucrative clients away by leveraging the fear of investing their time, money and effort into a potentially problem-riddled organization that by-and-large accepts, even embraces, a high rate of failure. Large enterprises don't like hearing about these types of problems with their vendors as they are inherently quite risk averse. Ultimately, I fear that this company, and others that have done the same, will soon realize this but it'll too late to save themselves from a flight of customers. Hey, who knows, prove me wrong. Anyway, just my opinion. I'm not trying to be negative, but just relaying a different perspective from someone who's been around the industry for some time.

paulddraper 11y ago
In hard times, there's a balance of concern between totally uninvested and stressed out of one's mind. In circumstances like the ones described, most people tend toward the latter. As an employee, this would be very welcome and probably very helpful in making the most of the situation. That said, it's crazy that they posted it for their customers to read. Hearing that my vendor has a "can fail" attitude isn't reassuring. I'd rather hear that my vendor is comprised of low-maintenance caffeine fueled super robots that keep their commitments with the stubbornness of a thousand donkeys. (I know they're probably not, but when choosing vendors, I'm usually working with limited info.) So...cool memo, weird post, nice thoughts.

ianamartin 11y ago

I think the naming of things comes in to play here a little bit. I think this piece would not have attracted the negativity it has here if it were entitled something a bit different, and I think, truer to the intent: Permission to be Human. Edited to add: I do very much appreciate that you wrote this and made it public. I think there's an empathy in your voice that's sorely lacking in the industry.

djsumdog 11y ago

Sites seems down. Mirror?

steinsgate 11y ago

I have also struggled with the same problem in the past: I couldn't stop obsessing about my work. I worked like a maniac. I expected the team to do the same, and drove them to the edge. We burned out after a while. At that point, I realized that startups are probably not for me. While I can work like a maniac, I don't like the effect it has on my well being. At that point I decided, I would rather go for small businesses, where the stress level is much lower and things are chill. The difference between a startup and a small business is outlined rather well in this Medium post. https://medium.com/swlh/you-think-you-re-a-startup-but-you-re-really-a-small-business-and-that-s-totally-cool-too-cd45ff80e6be#.rauyfyqpp https://medium.com/swlh/you-think-you-re-a-startup-but-you-r...

tedmiston 11y ago

Last month my startup closed our B round, led by Intel. While the change in pressure is a much smaller magnitude than what you're dealing with, for us the second-guessing is definitely stronger now. We analyze what we do more and question a lot of the things we spend time on. I knew there'd be more pressure, but I wasn't expecting such a sweeping wave.