It is important to differentiate between * Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again * Detectable

It is important to differentiate between * Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again * Detectable / Manageable failures: You fail, but this failure is not central to your existence, so you simply try again While there are some cases where you have no option but to risk catastrophic failures, manageable failures are something people completely miss. Fitness / Weight training has all sorts of examples of this, the goal is to identify the limits of your abilities and to push this limit, without risking permanent damage. Consider this: Blogger (Pyra Collab tools), Flickr (GNE), Twitter (Odeo), Nokia Phones (losses for first 15 yrs), Google (initial focus was Enterprise Search until Adwords / Adsense acquisition) were all pushing the limits, and failing, but not so spectacularly that they didn't have resources left to pivot. Identifying the difference, and the ability to contain possibly-catastrophic errors into manageable pieces is the true art of the startup.