Jimmy Wales' Theory of Failure 164
Hugh Pickens writes "The Tampa Tribune reports that Jimmy Wales recently spoke at the TEDx conference in Tampa about the three big failures he had before he started Wikipedia, and what he learned from them. In 1996 Wales started an Internet service to connect downtown lunchers with area restaurants. 'The result was failure,' says Wales. 'In 1996, restaurant owners looked at me like I was from Mars.' Next Wales started a search engine company called 3Apes. In three months, it was taken over by Chinese hackers and the project failed. Third was an online encyclopedia called Nupedia, a free encyclopedia created by paid experts. Wales spent $250,000 for writers to make 12 articles, and it failed. Finally, Wales had a 'really dumb idea,' a free encyclopedia written by anyone who wanted to contribute. That became Wikipedia, which is now one of the top 10 most-popular Web sites in the world. This leads to Wales' theories of failure: fail faster — if a project is doomed, shut it down quickly; don't tie your ego to any one project — if it stumbles, you'll be unable to move forward; real entrepreneurs fail; fail a lot but enjoy yourself along the way; if you handle these things well, 'you will succeed.'"
Articles about failure being good... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen other articles about failure being good for the creative process, namely the cover story of Wired a couple months ago. The thing is, if these people had continued failing and never had a success, we would never have heard of them. Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.
'Fail Often, Fail Early' Is Not Just Wales' Mantra (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and everyone's got their own version of it [businessweek.com]. I've heard people correct me when I said "Fail Early, Fail Often" and they say that the order matters. But you'll hear three concepts in these phrases:
So the ultimate incarnation I've heard of this is "Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap."
Now for the warning: if you take this too much to heart, you see people axing everything. And from the technical point of view, it sucks. And is demoralizing. Another thing is you get really really sick of hearing it and just being the silver bullet response to "why can't I do X?"
Re:Articles about failure being good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.
No, successful people and companies keep failing. They just hide it. Look at Google. I've heard they give their employees a fifth of their time to work on their own project that doesn't have to have a customer. So, if that's true, you have to think of how many thousand projects are going on inside Google that never see the light of day. A few of them make it out but it's definitely the shotgun approach to success. Fire enough bullets at once and one of them is bound to hit your target ...
Successful people keep failing but they use their resources to expand and diversify what they are doing so that they can prune it down to look like their succeeding more often than not. Some companies just outright suck at it and will push a failure all the way to launch.
Thinking that successful people stop failing is a dangerous assumption. You don't get to the top and from that point on never suffer a setback or have to kill a project early because it's not working out. Knowing when to do that is what makes those successful people successful. Wales says it should be early and often.
Re:Articles about failure being good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course successful people think that failure is good for you: they stopped doing it.
What you are saying here is that failure or success is more or less a choice, an activity you do. You could actually go out and succeed or fail, by sheer choice.
I think what these 'successful' people are saying is, "Look, I didn't do anything different in the times when I failed or succeeded. It looked like a good idea, I worked very hard, and nothing came of it. Then, on another project that had similar looking prospects to the failure, by chance it succeeded. So if you don't persist through failures, you will likely never see the success, which is more the case of 'fortune favors the prepared'."
As a failed entrepreneur (Score:5, Insightful)
Just don't fear it. (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is not to fear failure and to view a single failure as the end of the world forever.
The ideas of failure that have been ingrained into you by school and your corporate overlords is bogus.
The point is not to give up after your first attempt ever.
Re:As a failed entrepreneur (Score:5, Insightful)
Bingo. To summarize: spend lots of other people's money.throwing crap at the wall as fast as you can until something sticks. Alternatively, be rich, dabble at things and have fun. Not really realistic advice for most people.
You know... (Score:1, Insightful)
I wouldn't exactly call Wikipedia a "success." Just because something is popular doesn't mean the world is better off for it to have been made. I submit as proof of concept: 4chan.
Wikipedia is a great source for winning internet debates. And that's about it. But people treat it like it's actually a credible source, under the delusion that any incorrect information will be crowd-source corrected.
I got news for you, the majority of people are *idiots.* Common knowledge is usually WRONG. I think the world would have been better off if wikipedia had failed too, rather than so many dumbasses taking it as gospel fact. The only saving grace it possess is it's an aggregator of source material - usually. Those "external references" can be useful sometimes. But by the same token, you still need to analyse THOSE sources yourself, too. It's not like Wikipedia cares if the source used in the article is only a half-step better than the National Enquirer. They just want A source.
Re:Articles about failure being good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing to remember is: "don't be afraid to think big" (or fail big, perhaps). Apple, McDonalds, Google, Dell and others have grown from small enterprises into big corporations. Some of that is luck, being at the right place at the right time and all that, but not all of it. And there are many similar small successes that have failed to cross over into the big time, or failed to even try.
You have to LEARN from failure (Score:3, Insightful)
Not just fail over and over again. Its now whether you fail but how you deal with failure. Learning from your failures means you wont make
the same mistakes, youll make brand new ones, but youll learn from those too.
Re:You have to LEARN from failure (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're not failing 90% of the time, you're not tackling interesting enough problems.
It was aimed at academics, but it applies equally well to business.
Re:You know... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You know... (Score:2, Insightful)
The ability to generate revenue is only necessary for a very superficial type of success. I think your attitude is caused by laissez faire capitalism—the idea that the market is perfect so any contribution that adds value will be rewarded commensurately.
But this economics only works for traditional (excludable, rivalrous) goods like wagon wheels. It doesn't work at all for public goods like technology, ideas, culture, etc—most of the stuff that actually improves the world permanently. There are tons of examples (for instance Telsa died poor after inventing the induction motor and a thousand other things).
Anyway, wikipedia=public good. For public goods, ability to generate revenue has nothing to do with success or value.
the Journal Nature disagrees with you (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent is right and should have mentioned that the comparison has been made by no other than the journal Nature.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html [nature.com]
(unfortunately, not full article, another reason to appreciate community efforts like Wikipedia)
Encyclopedia Britannica protested publicly and asked Nature to retract itself.
Nature said OK, we will check our facts again. They did so and confirmed their original results.
I am not surprised to see comments like those of the grandparents reappear. What I find worrisome is to see that they get modded insightful.
Wikipedia is accessible everywhere in the world, to billions (I am tempted to write "billions and billions"...) of people.
It is a game changing accomplishment.
Re:Articles about failure being good... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've actually seen a few examples - they do the right things, they're just unlucky (well I just have no idea why they aren't more successful). For example I've seen some restaurants - the food is good, the location is OK, prices reasonable, service OK. But they're still struggling with few customers. Whereas close by is a more expensive restaurant that's not really better in terms of quality, but with many customers. There's one restaurant I know of which did advertise regularly and even independent food blogs blogged the restaurant favourably. It's quite sad to see them eventually having to cut quality, portions and raise prices after years of struggling (there's just so much money you can burn) - and still struggle...
Jimmy Wales might say - if your business looks like it's dying, cut your losses quick and start a new one. And he eventually strikes gold, and brags about it.
Whereas Mr X might say, if your business looks like it's dying, don't give up, try doing X like me, and he eventually strikes gold, and brags about it.
That's why most of those "X ways to be like successful me" books seem more like "How I eventually struck the lottery- you can be like me - just keep trying, don't give up!".
Now if Successful Person has a track record of turning around other people's businesses that are decent but struggling (not talking about turning around obvious crap), and wrote a decent book/article about it, then that would be an interesting read.
Lots of people do win the lottery, I'm interested if they actually have an above average technique of doing so[1]. Otherwise, meh...
[1] Yes, I know of the "wait till the jackpot gets really big, then try to buy up all the numbers" method.
...a free encyclopedia written by anyone... (Score:2, Insightful)
...except in this case "anyone" means "a small cabal of editors with all the time to spend guarding their pet pages against edits submitted by the likes of filthy scoundrels such as you".
I like the concept of wikipedia and all but let's stop kidding ourselves. The site stopped being editable by all a few years back. Good luck trying to edit any existing pages because your edits will be rolled back faster than you can hit refresh.
Re:the Journal Nature disagrees with you (Score:4, Insightful)
Because there are very good examples that Wikipedia is, quite frankly, full of bullshit. I know people that have tried to correct some things they had very factual but relatively little verifiable sources of and got reverted because they referenced a forum of people that had pulled it out of their ass. I'm sure other people have their stories about pages that are full of crap.
However when you zoom out there's tons of pages that are just fine, it's easy to get hung up on a few broken pages. I just checked the wikipedia page of my hometown in Norway on the English wikipedia. There's about 8 screenfuls of content, It's somewhat of a mixed bag but it's much longer than Encyclopedia Britannica and has as far as I can tell no factual errors. What good is that? Well it's *good enough* if I just want to point people to a brief summary of where I come from. And unlike any other article on the topic which I could easily find elsewhere on the Internet, it's linked up to everything else. That's what makes wikipedia good, it's the sheer mass of inter-linking. The page itself is just so-so.
And drink a pint of whiskey every day (Score:5, Insightful)
This type of anecdotal philosophy is useless. It is the equivalent of asking a 100 year old man what the secret to his long life was. The answer is never, "Well, I just happened to be a couple of sigma away from the mean in the normal distribution of human longevity". It is always like "get up early every morning, smoke a cigar every night, drink a pint of whiskey every day, etc."
For every anecdote there is an equal and opposite anecdote. It's like a law or something. What about the tale of Bruce and the Spider, where the King of Scotland is inspired by a spider after losing to the Brits six times to go out and try again? According to Jimmy Wales, the King should have packed it in after one or two.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
Don't throw good money after bad.
etc.
Go Proverb (Score:2, Insightful)
And fail cheap. (Score:4, Insightful)
Fail cheap. This might be derived from 'fail early' as time is money. But this is the third optional part you'll hear from investors and businessmen.
Right. This is something the better venture capitalists used to keep in mind. As a group, venture capitalists have lost money since 2000, because there's too much venture capital available and companies are running too long on VC money. (Much VC money is dumb money now. Too much money is desperately looking for decent yields in a period when no investment is doing well.)
Venture capital in Silicon Valley used to be about technology. Someone would propose building a thing, and would get VC funding to build a prototype. Either it worked, or it didn't. If it failed, the VCs were out the cost of building a prototype. If it worked, there was a potential business. The failure rate was about 9 out of 10, and a win meant a 10 to 100x profit.
As semiconductor, electronics, and software technology matured, startups tended to be business concepts rather than technology concepts. So they had to be brought to the point of having a sizable user base before it was clear whether they'd succeed or fail. This led to the first dot-com boom. In that boom, it was possible to take companies public early, and the VCs could often cash out before the business failed. (I used to track this; see Downside's Deathwatch, [downside.com] where "chart is not available for this symbol" isn't a bug; it means the company is gone and forgotten.)
In the second dot-com boom ("Web 2.0"), investors weren't willing to pay for untried companies. So Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace are still running on VC money. Myspace could have gone public a few years ago, but it's too late now. Adult Friendfinder tried to go public last week [nytimes.com], but just gave up.
Wales' business, Wikia, is in that category - VC-funded, losing money, and lacking an exit strategy. The problem is that VCs looked at Wales' success with Wikipedia, which is a nonprofit, and thought that would translate into business success. It didn't. They should have looked at his unbroken string of business failures.
VC-funded companies don't always succeed or fail. There's a third option, and it's the most common - the "zombie" company. The company makes enough money to cover its expenses, but not enough to pay back its investors. This is, in fact, the most common outcome. VCs usually have a stable of zombies they're trying to sell to somebody, anybody, just to get them off the books. They usually end up being sold to some big player in the same field at a huge discount.
His fourth and biggest failure yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
[Disclaimer for US Americans: If you confuse my argumentation with that of creationist retards, you definitely misunderstood me. I understand why. Because they misuse arguments such as these for their base motives. As you see below, I go very much against them. So don’t let them pull everything in the dirt that they touch, and don’t fall for a knee-jerk reaction. :)]
His biggest failure was a basic architectural assumption of Wikipedia. The assumption of “the one global truth(iness)”.
This caused him to make Wikipedia a centralized and centrally controlled site, instead of a P2P system.
Of course this was based on very good intentions, and originally not a problem, since everyone could edit everything. Because with those assumptions, how could there ever be two people disagreeing with each other? Ever? ;))
Naturally there were people who disagreed. And naturally they found the one main reason why one can only theoretically but not realistically assume a global truth: Because sometimes it is simply impossible to find out which view is really true. E.g. because no one of them got a time machine handy, to fly back into the past, and see for himself. Or because resolving it with quantum physics is not yet possible without calculations taking anything less than billions of years. And because of course in physics, everything is defined relative to other things.
But even this could have been resolved by educated people with a knowledge of physics and logic, trough simply stating what it proven to what level (e.g. an experiment, a video clip, just a theory, just speculation), and leaving the side-taking with the cavemen.
Unfortunately there are people, that are unable to discuss things reasonably. (E.g. aforementioned religious fundamentalists.)
So the idea of one global truth had to die. But what replaced it, was even worse: The people who control Wikipedia started to just accuse everybody who disagreed, of being unable to discuss things reasonably, and the deletion and flame wars started.
This is the sad state that Wikipedia is in now. Everything is controlled, approved, and doubly approved. By a group of people who sometimes just don’t know what they are even talking about.
See, the point of a P2P Wikipedia would not have been, to make every crazy bullshit out there equal. But to give them there own sandbox, way away from us, where they could play, and not disturb us. Like Conservapedia: It does no harm, even though it is out there, because everybody knows how silly it is, and just laughs at it.
Wales hat very good intentions and a great idea. But he was waay deep in treehugger happy happy imaginationland with some of those descisions. And I also was there with him for some time. Until I took a harder look at reality. ^^
Douchebag (Score:5, Insightful)
Wales didn't found found Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] alone, though he does his damnedest convince the world that he did. He's just a typical douchbag marketing businessman who wants to take all the credit for the work of others.
Re:Douchebag (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Articles about failure being good... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've actually seen a few examples - they do the right things, they're just unlucky (well I just have no idea why they aren't more successful). For example I've seen some restaurants - the food is good, the location is OK, prices reasonable, service OK. But they're still struggling with few customers. Whereas close by is a more expensive restaurant that's not really better in terms of quality, but with many customers. There's one restaurant I know of which did advertise regularly and even independent food blogs blogged the restaurant favourably. It's quite sad to see them eventually having to cut quality, portions and raise prices after years of struggling (there's just so much money you can burn) - and still struggle...
This is where people really get lost......they see two restaurants, one that does well, and another that does poorly, and think, "I can't see why they're failing, that's just the way it is, nothing you can do about it."
Whereas if they had actually sat down and asked themselves, "what do I need to change to be successful?" There are reasons some restaurants succeed and some fail, it isn't just dumb luck. The person who figures out what those reasons are will be the one who is successful. The person who doesn't know why they are failing, and doesn't figure out how to change that will be the one who continues failing.