>I've actually never heard a true failure story in silicon valley Chances are you haven't heard that story because the people it happens to are too busy seeing

>I've actually never heard a true failure story in silicon valley Chances are you haven't heard that story because the people it happens to are too busy seeing their therapist to post on HN and tell you about it. Failure may be perfectly acceptable in SV and in the US generally, but the tradeoff is that we are generally expected to treat failure as a temporary status, something that happens on the way to success. Note that I said it was a status, not a category of person. You say "what we have instead is a plethora of fake failures who experienced a few hiccups on their path to success..." -- but the whole concept of a person being a "failure" is what SV doesn't really have. You aren't a failure; your crappy business was a failure, a failed attempt at something. And now you have learned from it, are moving on, etc. There are lots of brutal failure stories in SV, and they were not fake at all at the time they were happening. Subsequent success does not invalidate the failure you experience.