Autumn Marathon

Failing Quickly

I recently lucked into a fabulous consulting engagement with an entrepreneurial start-up company which is launching a transformative IT product.  It’s just the sort of company that I despaired of finding in New York City (such companies are much easier to find in California or in other pockets of the US).  Though it’s a product I believe in and with people I can trust, I am avoiding treating this as just a job, and not only because I have not been offered an official position.   I’m trying to heed advice that I pass on to aspiring entrepreneurs of all ages, given by Tina Seeling, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures program and author of the book What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. Two of her ten lessons are:

• You don’t have to wait to be annointed (i.e., don’t wait until someone tells you are responsible for something to start taking action); and
• If your not failing some of the time, you are not taking enough risks.

There are a hundred reasons why a company like this can fail even if the basic idea is correct - bad timing, insufficient funding, poor implementation of the concept, stronger competitors, Just to name a few.  And there are dozens of reasons why I might not be the right person to help the company: not technical enough, not salesman enough, personality conflict with the founder, with colleagues, etc.  But in less than two weeks, I have developed some strong ideas about what the company can do to increase it’s chances of success.  I’m not going to wait for someone to make these part of my job description to start making them happen.  And if I do fail, I need to fail quickly, learn some lessons, and move onto the next venture.