Failure Is An Option

Dave McClure has a touching tribute to his friend Jad Duwaik, an entrepreneur who died recently.

As Dave points out, the irony is that one of the reasons Jad was well-known was for writing a gritty, honest piece called “Diary of a Failure” for the Chronicle.

In it, Jad talks about losing the money he made on the sale of his first company and the painful process of trying to look for a job.

The world of startups is inherently a world of failure.

The estimates are that only 1/10th of venture-backed companies succeed, and those lucky firms (who are the most likely to succeed) make up a small percentage of all startups.

Chances are that you’ll fail a lot before you succeed. I know this from personal experience. I would argue that I’m still not successful, based on the extrinsic criteria of being rich and famous (though I would argue that I’m good-looking, so one out of three ain’t bad).

Failure is inevitable. What counts is how you react when you’ve failed.

Back in the bust days, when people asked me what I did, I told them, “I’m an unemployed bum.” But them, I’d add, “And I’m working on a couple of startups.”