Taking Risks, the Art of Failing, and God

My co-founder Josh and I attended a Columbia University Business School class on Entrepreneurship. RightsCube was one of the invited guests, along with PayPerks and FSA-Store - two other Columbia grad ventures.

When we got to the panel section the professor - Murray Low - asked the panel what they thought about failure. How we as entrepreneurs think about failing, taking risks, and what sort of consequences we thought of.

Josh gave a very eloquent response about how we as entrepreneurs don’t take risks - in fact the whole concept of being an entrepreneur means that we do everything humanly possibly to minimize risk and create more certain outcomes. This argument was an abridged version of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments from his essay on this topic - “The Sure Thing.”

I couldn’t help but smile at Professor Low’s question. If you are not scared of failure when you’re starting a venture, then you’re not really starting a venture. If its that easy to do then everyone would be doing it. They are not because its not easy. Its one of the hardest things to do. The only thing you can hope for is that you fail fast if you fail - and iterate around those failures. The longer you take to fail, the bigger and more permanent that failure is likely to be.

As I thought about his question a little more I was reminded of what Bob Pittman (who used to run AOL Time Warner) said to me once - that if I wasn’t on a mission from God then I shouldn’t be on the mission. People often talk about the circumstances that surround a successful entrepreneur, but they often forget one crucial factor the smartest and also dumbest-but-luckiest entrepreneurs have in common: total confidence that can often fly in the face of reality.

Entrepreneurs often have a confidence in their vision that sometimes seems religious. It’s no coincidence that some of the people who have transformed our world with technology are called evangelists. And it’s no coincidence that the zeal with which some entrepreneurs pursue their visions and dreams can have the same unknowable logic that religious beliefs have. How can you believe that your company will be successful? How do you know God exists? Sometimes we just know. 

Ironically, the titans of technology who put their faith in technology and science have more in common with their robed brethren than they may realize.