COLUMBUS, Ohio — Entrepreneurs aren’t hardwired to think about failure.
“Stay positive.”
“Think different.”
“Out work the competition.”
Those are the mantras of startup success.
But failure is unavoidable, even if some pretend it doesn’t exist. And to ignore the inevitable is a big mistake, said the two panelists in a Columbus Startup Week session that attempted to demystify failure.
“You will fail,” said Nathan Heerdt, president of Digital Scout in Columbus. “There is no way you can avoid that.”
So how do you succeed at failing? Heerdt and Andy Sparks, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Mattermark in San Francisco, shared several insights on Thursday they gained from hitting rock bottom.
“Failure really, really sucks,” Sparks said. “But I would do everything the same way again. It’s worth it.”
Here are three lessons they learned.
Lean on your family
Running a startup is an all-consuming activity. But if you don’t make room in your life for others, then you won’t have the emotional lifeline to help you get through the depths of failure.
“Trust me,” Heerdt said. “You need to be able to depend on your wife or your spouse or your family.”
If it wasn’t for the support of his wife, Heerdt said, he doubts he would have had the strength to start a new company after his first business, Jobboards.com, ended.
Be patient
It takes time to see the upside of your mistakes. “Perspective doesn’t come until later,” Heerdt says. For instance, he said his second business—Caster Ventures, a streaming video website—went under in 2009 because he failed to put together a strong enough team.
He didn’t see the value of that failure until two years later when he took over Digital Scout and assembled a top-notch team to upgrade technology and expand the customer base of the tracking service for high school sports statistics, avoiding the mistake he made before. “It was at that moment I was able to turn around and go, ‘Ah, failure does lead to success sometimes,” he said.
You also need to recognize it may take a while to get over the emotional scars of a failed business. That’s what happened to Sparks when LaunchGram, an online product promotion service he co-founded, struggled after he moved from Columbus to California in 2011. “It took two years to feel like a real person again,” he said. “Failure does a lot of damage to you.”
“It’s really easy to talk about ‘fail fast’ and ‘fail hard,’ ” Sparks added. “But a lot of people don’t talk about what it actually feels like to when you go through it.”
Listen to Yoda
As Sparks struggled to make sense of LaunchGram’s failure, he received an email from a friend, Christian Long, a Columbus entrepreneur.
The email quoted Yoda’s famous line from The Empire Strikes Back: “Do or do not. There is no try.”
As any Star Wars fan knows, Yoda spoke the line to Luke Skywalker during his Jedi training on the swamp planet Dagobah.
Sparks drew inspiration from the quote, risking ridicule by plastering it across the background of his computer.
“It helped me realize that failure is something that happens when you set out on adventures,” Sparks said. “I pictured Luke on Dagobah with Yoda. I knew the path wouldn’t be easy. But Christian helped me see that there was a path.”
