Contemplating Failure

Contemplating Failure

AI by Nightcafe

The demise of their start-up was triggered by a phone call.

Rajesh called Manoj to ask whether he could fund an overdue payment to a vendor, because  “I only have 15,000 bucks in my bank account.”

“I only have 5,000.”

Let’s buy a bottle of whiskey instead, they decided. As the co-founders drank into the night, they decided it was time to accept failure. The eco-system in which they operated was harsh, and unforgiving. Truckers and commodity traders wanted their money now, and the threats that lurked under the coarse language were very real.

“It was like PTSD*, and it took a while before the sense of relief took over”, Manoj reflects, five years later.

Would he consider another start-up, I asked Manoj. Absolutely. This time, the work would have to hew closer to his nature. 

“Investors talk a lot about ‘product-market’ fit. But I think founder-market fit comes first; I could spend days locked up in a room, working on perfecting an algorithm, but I realised I’m not cut out for an operationally heavy business.”

“At first sight, there was a great fit between me and the business”, Samriddhi said of her start-up, a platform for placement of blue-collar immigrants into the Delhi-NCR region. The work had a social context, and supported the vulnerable. But the potential employers they engaged with were small businesses, whose morality was ambiguous, the landscape was populated with side-deals, and their competitors were labour contractors with no scruples. 

In hindsight, it is clear that she was not cut out for this work; yet she and her partner pressed on, till the cash ran out. Insolvency was probably a boon, and cut short the agony, as admitting failure is tough; this is something I heard often, as I talked to founders. Super grades at school, admission to a top college,  job with a global employer, these founders had never known failure before. Faced with that prospect, stress becomes existential, people take decisions that don’t really sit with their own sense of self. 

“Make time for yourself, examine the stress; It’s really tough, because the task always seems so big, there’s always so much to be done, but my advice to founders is - this reflection is not indulgent, it’s essential.”

And when you did finally admit failure, what did it do to you?, I asked Samriddhi.

“It completely broke my confidence.”

In a start-up, the sense of identification with the business is so strong, it really becomes part of your identity. When the business fails, as a consequence, the sense of personal failure is over-powering. I don’t think it’s easy to get away from this. Start-ups require such a high degree of passion and immersion that any sense of detachment would be a bit like dozing at the wheel.

“I actually think the failure was good for me Gaurav suggested… I always tended to be over-confident.” 

I recalled the first time I met Gaurav in my living room, when I was deeply impacted by his intensity and the sense of competence he wore with quiet pride.

“My arrogance took a knock, and that is a good thing. But as far as failure is concerned, one has to define failure: my attempt was to build a successful, sustainable business. Very few people are able to do this even once in a lifetime. So if the first effort failed, it’s OK. But the thing is that it hasn’t dimmed my self-confidence in being able to look at a problem, analyse it, break it down…solve it.”

More power to these young folks, to their ability to reflect and distil the learnings from failure. At their age, I took failure on the chin, and staggered into the next battle, wounded and scarred, more bandaged jawan than strategic general. It was not till I was in my 40s, and spent a few years in the quiet of the hills that I began to gain an understanding of self.

What I did know is that “We simply don’t know — we don’t know where life ultimately leads, we don’t know what we want or what to want, and we don't really know ourselves. It is by erring again and again that we find the shape of the path, by tripping again and again that we learn to walk it. Along the way, the answers emerge not before us but in us.” Maria Popova

Samriddhi had said as much, “The workshops I now do are very much me, they are my baby. Even if it all goes to shit, it is of internal value.”

More often than not, it will all go to shit; most of what we do is ephemeral. All that remains - till we, too, go to shit - is the learning, the answers that emerge in us. To quote Lewis Thomas, “We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds when there are more choices than two… the richness of selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.”

New ground on which we must teach ourselves to dance a new dance.

*Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Some names have been changed to protect the identity of people I interviewed.