Today I heard Bill Younger, Managing Director of Sutter Hill Ventures, speak about entrepreneurship. All good stuff about focus, team, learning from failure, listening, delighting customers, empathy and integrity. Venture capitalists at the end of the day don't invest in technologies and products as much as people. He always ask people during interviews about their biggest failure. If they have none, they haven't dreamt big enough or risked enough. He also cares about what they've learned from their failures.
His favorite book is Wind, Sun, and Stars by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. Most of his friends couldn't understand how an engineer could love a book on philosophy -- and didn't share his taste -- but he found it inspiring fare. Other books on his top 5 are Undaunted Courage and Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.
Younger related a truism. A CEO says that good decisions are key to to his success. How does he make good decisions? Experience, he says. How did he gain experience? Bad decisions.
Younger also quotes John Wooden, one of his heroes:
"Worry more about your character than your reputation. Character is what you are, reputation merely what others think you are."
He spoke briefly about NVidia, a portfolio company and an extremely successful (and hip) semiconductor company known for their cutting-edge computer graphics chips. What may not be so well known is that their first idea failed, then their next idea failed and after re-inventing themselves a third time (luckily with enough runway left) they hit upon success.
After Younger spoke, what I thought about is this:
People's beliefs, feelings, assumptions, and stories around success and failure ARE philosophy - and we are living out our philosophy (whether or not we care to read about philosophy) all the time.
There is a picture painted somewhere in our collective unconsciousness that successful people or successful organizations never in their lives, never in their history stumble, never doubt, and never have a bad hair day. They are a different breed.
This was reinforced the other day when a friend of mine (whom exudes success) admitted she hated to tell me when all was not rosy with her because "I had it all together" and I probably couldn't relate. People are more alike than not, and so too organizations.
Failure is not the only way to success, but it is one teacher that you can't slink away from. I've learned that failure is an outcome of fear. And facing failure with genuine curiousity and inquiry and blamelessness is one way toward success. (Don't want to steer you towards seeking failure. Failure is not a prerequisite for success; there are other paths but nearly no one takes these easier, counter-intuitive routes.)
NVidia's lessons aren't to be found on their website. A website is just a snapshot in time, not a memoir.
There's definite value in sharing these corporate and individual memoirs, and I don't think the intention is to gloss over the bumps in their history in their website or their annual report. But the value of those stories is for others to recognize themselves in the story. Don't assume what you see in front of you -- a successful company meeting its objectives or a person achieving their dreams -- tells you about their past.
There can come a point where an individual or a team turns a corner -- and failure is just not in their reality any longer. They've incorporated the lessons from the past -- but to them the past is only that -- past -- and now is the only thing that matters.
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