6 ms·

In Silicon Valley, stories about failure are a form of social currency

56 points by steven 12y ago

Red_Tarsius 12y ago
Fake failures aside, I didn't really appreciate the article. Do you know what you get without failure culture? Italy. In my home country, if you fuck up it's over. People will laugh at your totally unrealistic attempt to strive for more. Everyone must fall to the lowest denominator. Italians don't see failure as a short-term result, but as a lesson about life itself.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  Do you know what you get without failure culture? Italy. So it's one or the other then? No spectrum in between, just pick one? Interesting to know.
  - Red_Tarsius 12y ago
    I genuinely don't know how to respond to your comment. It's obvious that the real world is not made of mutually exclusive scenarios.
    - forgottenpass 12y ago
      Unless you define everywhere on the spectrum of cultural attitudes towards failure as either "failure culture" or "Italy-like", you're beginning to understand my frustration with your first post.
      - patorjk 12y ago
        I think they're just making a point about what the absence of any kind of acceptance of failure is like. It's not that there's a spectrum between "failure culture" and "Italy-like", it's that "failure culture" itself is the spectrum, and Italy-like is the point at the very end. It's what happens people don't respect failure.
        forgottenpass 12y ago
        OK, I think I get it. But that's what I've been taking issue with all along. There is little substance is running to the polar opposite as the only alternative. And the system of categorization seems like tee-ing up for just-so stories about the benefits of "failure culture" and "acceptance of failure."
- bitcrusher 12y ago
  It's not just Italy. Places outside of Silicon Valley, within the USA have the same outlook. Personally, I think this 'failure as a badge of wisdom' is one of the 'secret' ingredients for the 'Silicon Valley' recipe.
  - Red_Tarsius 12y ago
    I think this attitude is part of what Thiel calls indefinite pessimism.
    - harpastum 12y ago
      For anyone else unfamiliar with the term, I just found this blog post that explains Zak Slayback's understanding of Thiel's indefinite pessimism: http://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-definite-indefinite-societies-according-to-peter-thiel/ http://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-definit... It's a pretty good read. The relevant section regarding Italy: "Thiel’s identification of the indefinite pessimists: modern-day Europeans. 'The world is going to hell in a hand basket, so we might as well as drink and be merry,'"
  - forgottenpass 12y ago
    Places outside of Silicon Valley, within the USA have the same outlook. Everywhere has people who have go-nowhere attitudes, but it all depends on the type of people you know, it's not universal. The thing unique to the Valley is that it has people flush with capital that encourage large, repeated, expensive risk taking in tech products with low expectations of success. And, spoiler warning, there is nothing secret about it.
- wehadfun 12y ago
  Feel like in this article Sanflippo said something similar about the culture https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8782667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8782667
- melvinmt 12y ago
  I'd say not only Italy, but Europe in general (I'm from the Netherlands and it has the same poisonous culture).
- aswanson 12y ago
  Not just Italy. That's pretty much the East Coast of the U.S. as well. Engineers looked at me like I wanted to start a cocaine trafficking network when I suggested starting a company back in school. The east coast is like Italy with worse weather.
- deveac 12y ago
  My sentiments as well. When you're confronted with the "Fail Fast" trope as often folks on here are, it gets predictable to the point where it can be mocked. That's cool. #fumblebrag is actually a pretty hilarious term. But at the end of the day, as long as we're not too cynical, I believe that a culture that nurtures taking chances to the point where Fumblebrag exists is, on the balance, much better than the alternative.
- droque 12y ago
  It's similar in Mexico. It’s not a coincidence that FuckUp Nights started there. It’s a very traditionalist and failure averse country, so that “making it” means being a manager in a good position in an old monopoly, even in entrepreneurial circles (even then, is limited to family-sized stable business). (It also helps that the upper-middle class in Mexico imitates american ways of life). So it’s an antidote for that location.
littletimmy 12y ago
I've actually never heard a true failure story in silicon valley. Something like... "I started this company with my entire life's worth of savings, but it blew up. So now I have no income and my wife left me along with the kids. My life isn't worth living anymore and I am seeing a therapist thrice a week to stop blowing my brains out." THAT would be failure. That's real, with real consequences. That is hard to get out of, and when someone does that person usually has a valuable lesson to share. I have no doubt there are some failures like that out there, but they almost never share their story. What we have instead is a plethora of fake failures who experienced a few hiccups on their path to success. The current way the word failure is used is like "awesome" or "incredible" or any of these other top-shelf words used for rather mundane occurances. It cheapens our language for no reason.
- alwaysdoit 12y ago
  If this is your standard for failure, you're going to experience quite a bit of selection bias: - Anyone who actually is driven to the point of actually committing suicide will not be around to tell stories for obvious reasons. - Anyone who is driven to the point of bankruptcy is unlikely to stick around the Valley with its incredibly high cost of living, (unless you are talking to the homeless, which it sounds like you aren't because there are plenty of stories of failures to hear). - He or she also probably doesn't have money for a therapist. Realistically, the reason people like failure stories is because it is encouraging when you are in the midst of one to see examples of cases where "it gets better". It doesn't cheapen our language to use failure in this way any more than it cheapens our language to use any other form of hyperbole.
  - forgottenpass 12y ago
    It doesn't cheapen our language to use failure in this way any more than it cheapens our language to use any other form of hyperbole. That's cold comfort in a world where "literally" now also means "figuratively."
    - alwaysdoit 12y ago
michaelochurch 12y ago
The ideal of Silicon Valley (and of the U.S. in general) is that good-faith business failure shouldn't carry a lasting punishment. I like that. The last thing that I want is for us to become like many European and Asian societies where failure is shameful and often treated as permanent. That said, the Valley's true attitude toward failure is deeply classist. If you're well-connected because your daddy golfs with VCs, then you can take big risks with your startup knowing that, even if it fails, they'll just have it acqui-hired and give you another one. If you tire out in the pilot seat, they'll make you a VP at Facebook or Google and it's up to you whether you actually do any work for the next 3 years. This isn't some general policy of tolerating good-faith failure by talented people. It's protecting a social class. (Oh, and they excuse a lot of bad-faith failure, as well.) On the other hand, if you're from middle-class or lower origins, the results of failure in the Valley are very much Old World. I worked at Google 3 years ago, drew the manager with a 5-year history of using phony performance issues to tease out subordinates' health issues and then fucking with them. (I have cyclothymia, which sometimes produces hypergraphia.) Between that, and a quixotic attempt to save a major component of Google+ from complete failure (with a suggestion that had a lot of engineer support, and would have worked) I... ended up with more of a mailing-list presence than I should have had. You could say that this was a fuck-up on my part and you wouldn't be wrong. And here's the thing... 3 years later, I still get shit for it: job offers shot down, ill-informed comments about me on Hacker News, etc. So excuse me when I say this, but fuck this classist double standard about failure. I had to fight through mountains of shit over a bunch of stupid mailing-list posts, most of which were dead-to-rights accurate, and that failed more because of their tone rather than content... but if you're rich and well-connected and cause a company to melt down, ending 150 jobs, through mismanagement and reckless risk-taking, you're a hero? How the fuck does that make any sense? And why do we excuse people who do things that are actually unethical as if slimy behavior were the same thing as first-iteration roughness of a new product, when it's clearly not? The actual Silicon Valley is one where if you're well-connected, you can fail all over the place in ways that actually hurt people, and that's OK. If you're perceived as an outsider (see: Ellen Pao) then even the slightest mistakes will give people cause to destroy your reputation. Let's get rid of all this nonsense-- the clubby VCs, the slimy back-channeling-- and figure out a way to start fresh. I absolutely agree that the stigma on good-faith business failure out to go away. I'd love to see a world where small-business bank loans didn't require personal liability (defeating the purpose of limited-liability protections) and where mid-risk/mid-growth ("lifestyle") businesses (instead of get-big-or-die gambits) could find funding. But there's a classist, duplicitous edifice that we may have to take down first.
feintruled 12y ago
A culture that is accepting of failure is a good thing on balance, I think, but failure does have consequences beyond the personal ones of having to dust yourself off and steel yourself to try again. A Silicon Valley company I worked for "failed" by going bankrupt as a means to wriggle out of their various debts, only to be reborn phoenix like in a new guise. Some of these debts were to banks and investors who no doubt half expect any given investment to fail, but others were to people like office fitters who were left in the hole for many thousands of dollars. I doubt that they move in circles so accepting of failure..
j_baker 12y ago
Being accepting of failure is a good thing, but you have to wonder about the moral hazard that's being set up here. A person should be able to pick themselves up after a failure, but failure should not be rewarded. You should not be able to go to a conference and brag about your failures. You should not be rewarded for failure with an acquihire and a cushy job at a BigCo. This to me is a key component of the new bubble: the idea that your startup can fail without there being consequences or even be rewarded for failure.
- FeepingCreature 12y ago
  Under the assumption that success and failure reveals something about your skill, you are right. Under the assumption that success or failure are basically independent of innate skill and the only thing that determines one's ability is number and length of prior attempts (experience), bragging with failures can make sense. The message is not "I have failed four times", it's "I have tried four times (failed, but that's almost secondary)".
  - j_baker 12y ago
    Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, but I'm making the assumption that people should be rewarded for actual accomplishments. Failure is a learning experience, but it is not an accomplishment.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
      We pay people all the time for sharing the benefit of their learning experiences, why is failure any different? If I'm entering a particular industry, it may be worth real money to me to hear the details of someone's failed startup in that industry.
- spb 12y ago
  > This to me is a key component of the new bubble: the idea that your startup can fail without there being consequences or even be rewarded for failure. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
zBard 12y ago
For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy': that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances. - The Letters of JRR Tolkien
eldude 12y ago
The sad thing about the author's core anecdote is that he doesn't even understand what about his actions made him a failure. (He alludes to it at the end.) If your app/server is vulnerable to a single person taking it down with no recourse to where you "felt the grim reaper clasp [your] neck," then you have built a house of cards unable to withstand a gentle breeze. The issue isn't that your trust or lack of vetting, it's your dependency on others to build your idea; You're an idea person. It's true, he has no one to blame but himself, but not for trusting a stranger, but for want of software deployment skill.
normloman 12y ago
It's good we have a culture of accepting failure. The fumblebrag comes from a different aspect of the culture: The culture of being a complete douchebag, pretending you're always "crushing it," creating the appearance of success, and taking yourself way too seriously. This tension is present in everything I read on HN.
- themagician 12y ago
  There are only two people I know who ever actually "crushed" anything and who's success was a result of their own actions. The hundreds of others I've met it was either dumb luck, they started already having been successful, or they just fake the entire thing. The number of success stories in the Bay Area that are not a result of nepotism are few and far between. I don't say that with a sense of disdain, just reality. Because the majority of my own success can be attributed to nepotism.
stevejones 12y ago
Ironically this article is a fumblebrag for Silicon Valley itself.
polynomial 12y ago
Article starts off with a key element of the #fumblebrag: It was always ultimately someone else's fault. It was always some other loser that effed up. Your only flaw was not seeing in time what a loser that other guy was who caused you to fail. But now you're wiser, so that won't happen again. You won't "allow access" so carelessly. Because you're really important. And now you know the importance of that.

56 points by steven 12y ago

Fake failures aside, I didn't really appreciate the article. Do you know what you get without failure culture? Italy. In my home country, if you fuck up it's over. People will laugh at your totally unrealistic attempt to strive for more. Everyone must fall to the lowest denominator. Italians don't see failure as a short-term result, but as a lesson about life itself.

forgottenpass 12y ago
Do you know what you get without failure culture? Italy. So it's one or the other then? No spectrum in between, just pick one? Interesting to know.
- Red_Tarsius 12y ago
  I genuinely don't know how to respond to your comment. It's obvious that the real world is not made of mutually exclusive scenarios.
  - forgottenpass 12y ago
    Unless you define everywhere on the spectrum of cultural attitudes towards failure as either "failure culture" or "Italy-like", you're beginning to understand my frustration with your first post.
    - patorjk 12y ago
      I think they're just making a point about what the absence of any kind of acceptance of failure is like. It's not that there's a spectrum between "failure culture" and "Italy-like", it's that "failure culture" itself is the spectrum, and Italy-like is the point at the very end. It's what happens people don't respect failure.
      - forgottenpass 12y ago
        OK, I think I get it. But that's what I've been taking issue with all along. There is little substance is running to the polar opposite as the only alternative. And the system of categorization seems like tee-ing up for just-so stories about the benefits of "failure culture" and "acceptance of failure."
bitcrusher 12y ago
It's not just Italy. Places outside of Silicon Valley, within the USA have the same outlook. Personally, I think this 'failure as a badge of wisdom' is one of the 'secret' ingredients for the 'Silicon Valley' recipe.
- Red_Tarsius 12y ago
  I think this attitude is part of what Thiel calls indefinite pessimism.
  - harpastum 12y ago
    For anyone else unfamiliar with the term, I just found this blog post that explains Zak Slayback's understanding of Thiel's indefinite pessimism: http://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-definite-indefinite-societies-according-to-peter-thiel/ http://zakslayback.com/2014/10/07/pessimism-optimism-definit... It's a pretty good read. The relevant section regarding Italy: "Thiel’s identification of the indefinite pessimists: modern-day Europeans. 'The world is going to hell in a hand basket, so we might as well as drink and be merry,'"
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  Places outside of Silicon Valley, within the USA have the same outlook. Everywhere has people who have go-nowhere attitudes, but it all depends on the type of people you know, it's not universal. The thing unique to the Valley is that it has people flush with capital that encourage large, repeated, expensive risk taking in tech products with low expectations of success. And, spoiler warning, there is nothing secret about it.
wehadfun 12y ago
Feel like in this article Sanflippo said something similar about the culture https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8782667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8782667
melvinmt 12y ago
I'd say not only Italy, but Europe in general (I'm from the Netherlands and it has the same poisonous culture).
aswanson 12y ago
Not just Italy. That's pretty much the East Coast of the U.S. as well. Engineers looked at me like I wanted to start a cocaine trafficking network when I suggested starting a company back in school. The east coast is like Italy with worse weather.
deveac 12y ago
My sentiments as well. When you're confronted with the "Fail Fast" trope as often folks on here are, it gets predictable to the point where it can be mocked. That's cool. #fumblebrag is actually a pretty hilarious term. But at the end of the day, as long as we're not too cynical, I believe that a culture that nurtures taking chances to the point where Fumblebrag exists is, on the balance, much better than the alternative.
droque 12y ago
It's similar in Mexico. It’s not a coincidence that FuckUp Nights started there. It’s a very traditionalist and failure averse country, so that “making it” means being a manager in a good position in an old monopoly, even in entrepreneurial circles (even then, is limited to family-sized stable business). (It also helps that the upper-middle class in Mexico imitates american ways of life). So it’s an antidote for that location.

littletimmy 12y ago

I've actually never heard a true failure story in silicon valley. Something like... "I started this company with my entire life's worth of savings, but it blew up. So now I have no income and my wife left me along with the kids. My life isn't worth living anymore and I am seeing a therapist thrice a week to stop blowing my brains out." THAT would be failure. That's real, with real consequences. That is hard to get out of, and when someone does that person usually has a valuable lesson to share. I have no doubt there are some failures like that out there, but they almost never share their story. What we have instead is a plethora of fake failures who experienced a few hiccups on their path to success. The current way the word failure is used is like "awesome" or "incredible" or any of these other top-shelf words used for rather mundane occurances. It cheapens our language for no reason.

alwaysdoit 12y ago
If this is your standard for failure, you're going to experience quite a bit of selection bias: - Anyone who actually is driven to the point of actually committing suicide will not be around to tell stories for obvious reasons. - Anyone who is driven to the point of bankruptcy is unlikely to stick around the Valley with its incredibly high cost of living, (unless you are talking to the homeless, which it sounds like you aren't because there are plenty of stories of failures to hear). - He or she also probably doesn't have money for a therapist. Realistically, the reason people like failure stories is because it is encouraging when you are in the midst of one to see examples of cases where "it gets better". It doesn't cheapen our language to use failure in this way any more than it cheapens our language to use any other form of hyperbole.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  It doesn't cheapen our language to use failure in this way any more than it cheapens our language to use any other form of hyperbole. That's cold comfort in a world where "literally" now also means "figuratively."
  - alwaysdoit 12y ago

michaelochurch 12y ago

The ideal of Silicon Valley (and of the U.S. in general) is that good-faith business failure shouldn't carry a lasting punishment. I like that. The last thing that I want is for us to become like many European and Asian societies where failure is shameful and often treated as permanent. That said, the Valley's true attitude toward failure is deeply classist. If you're well-connected because your daddy golfs with VCs, then you can take big risks with your startup knowing that, even if it fails, they'll just have it acqui-hired and give you another one. If you tire out in the pilot seat, they'll make you a VP at Facebook or Google and it's up to you whether you actually do any work for the next 3 years. This isn't some general policy of tolerating good-faith failure by talented people. It's protecting a social class. (Oh, and they excuse a lot of bad-faith failure, as well.) On the other hand, if you're from middle-class or lower origins, the results of failure in the Valley are very much Old World. I worked at Google 3 years ago, drew the manager with a 5-year history of using phony performance issues to tease out subordinates' health issues and then fucking with them. (I have cyclothymia, which sometimes produces hypergraphia.) Between that, and a quixotic attempt to save a major component of Google+ from complete failure (with a suggestion that had a lot of engineer support, and would have worked) I... ended up with more of a mailing-list presence than I should have had. You could say that this was a fuck-up on my part and you wouldn't be wrong. And here's the thing... 3 years later, I still get shit for it: job offers shot down, ill-informed comments about me on Hacker News, etc. So excuse me when I say this, but fuck this classist double standard about failure. I had to fight through mountains of shit over a bunch of stupid mailing-list posts, most of which were dead-to-rights accurate, and that failed more because of their tone rather than content... but if you're rich and well-connected and cause a company to melt down, ending 150 jobs, through mismanagement and reckless risk-taking, you're a hero? How the fuck does that make any sense? And why do we excuse people who do things that are actually unethical as if slimy behavior were the same thing as first-iteration roughness of a new product, when it's clearly not? The actual Silicon Valley is one where if you're well-connected, you can fail all over the place in ways that actually hurt people, and that's OK. If you're perceived as an outsider (see: Ellen Pao) then even the slightest mistakes will give people cause to destroy your reputation. Let's get rid of all this nonsense-- the clubby VCs, the slimy back-channeling-- and figure out a way to start fresh. I absolutely agree that the stigma on good-faith business failure out to go away. I'd love to see a world where small-business bank loans didn't require personal liability (defeating the purpose of limited-liability protections) and where mid-risk/mid-growth ("lifestyle") businesses (instead of get-big-or-die gambits) could find funding. But there's a classist, duplicitous edifice that we may have to take down first.

feintruled 12y ago

A culture that is accepting of failure is a good thing on balance, I think, but failure does have consequences beyond the personal ones of having to dust yourself off and steel yourself to try again. A Silicon Valley company I worked for "failed" by going bankrupt as a means to wriggle out of their various debts, only to be reborn phoenix like in a new guise. Some of these debts were to banks and investors who no doubt half expect any given investment to fail, but others were to people like office fitters who were left in the hole for many thousands of dollars. I doubt that they move in circles so accepting of failure..

j_baker 12y ago

Being accepting of failure is a good thing, but you have to wonder about the moral hazard that's being set up here. A person should be able to pick themselves up after a failure, but failure should not be rewarded. You should not be able to go to a conference and brag about your failures. You should not be rewarded for failure with an acquihire and a cushy job at a BigCo. This to me is a key component of the new bubble: the idea that your startup can fail without there being consequences or even be rewarded for failure.

FeepingCreature 12y ago
Under the assumption that success and failure reveals something about your skill, you are right. Under the assumption that success or failure are basically independent of innate skill and the only thing that determines one's ability is number and length of prior attempts (experience), bragging with failures can make sense. The message is not "I have failed four times", it's "I have tried four times (failed, but that's almost secondary)".
- j_baker 12y ago
  Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, but I'm making the assumption that people should be rewarded for actual accomplishments. Failure is a learning experience, but it is not an accomplishment.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
    We pay people all the time for sharing the benefit of their learning experiences, why is failure any different? If I'm entering a particular industry, it may be worth real money to me to hear the details of someone's failed startup in that industry.
spb 12y ago
> This to me is a key component of the new bubble: the idea that your startup can fail without there being consequences or even be rewarded for failure. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

zBard 12y ago

For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy': that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances. - The Letters of JRR Tolkien

eldude 12y ago

The sad thing about the author's core anecdote is that he doesn't even understand what about his actions made him a failure. (He alludes to it at the end.) If your app/server is vulnerable to a single person taking it down with no recourse to where you "felt the grim reaper clasp [your] neck," then you have built a house of cards unable to withstand a gentle breeze. The issue isn't that your trust or lack of vetting, it's your dependency on others to build your idea; You're an idea person. It's true, he has no one to blame but himself, but not for trusting a stranger, but for want of software deployment skill.

normloman 12y ago

It's good we have a culture of accepting failure. The fumblebrag comes from a different aspect of the culture: The culture of being a complete douchebag, pretending you're always "crushing it," creating the appearance of success, and taking yourself way too seriously. This tension is present in everything I read on HN.

themagician 12y ago
There are only two people I know who ever actually "crushed" anything and who's success was a result of their own actions. The hundreds of others I've met it was either dumb luck, they started already having been successful, or they just fake the entire thing. The number of success stories in the Bay Area that are not a result of nepotism are few and far between. I don't say that with a sense of disdain, just reality. Because the majority of my own success can be attributed to nepotism.

stevejones 12y ago

Ironically this article is a fumblebrag for Silicon Valley itself.

polynomial 12y ago

Article starts off with a key element of the #fumblebrag: It was always ultimately someone else's fault. It was always some other loser that effed up. Your only flaw was not seeing in time what a loser that other guy was who caused you to fail. But now you're wiser, so that won't happen again. You won't "allow access" so carelessly. Because you're really important. And now you know the importance of that.