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 t

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.