Constructive Failure: The Difference in Silicon Valley

"I always tell people that what distinguishes Silicon Valley is not its successes, but the way in which it deals with failures." Randy Komisar explains in a video, brought to you from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, that failure is inevitable and unavoidable in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is all about innovation and "taking a risk to do things that haven't been done before." The title of his speech "The Biggest Successes are Often Bred from Failures" exemplifies the necessary mindset of an entrepreneur and why Silicon Valley has been able to capitalize on a philosophy of accepting failure and learning from it in order to produce winning companies. The industry is much like the batting averages of baseball, they will always have misses, but if this risk could somehow be reduced "then we wouldn't need Silicon Valley."

So how do we deal with failure?

Randy has had plenty of successes, serving as the CEO for LucasArts Entertainment, founding director of TiVo, and now a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But he has also experienced "some screaming financial failures." Randy's main point is that as an entrepreneur we must learn from our failures and take them as a success "in terms of the development of character, spree décor, and developing the tools for dealing with immense challenges in complex businesses."

The difference in dealing with failure divides the corporate world and the entrepreneurial one. In the corporate world "what is generally lacking, is a culture of constructive failure. The ability to tolerate failure, proceed with your career, and do it again and take your experience and cash in on it as an asset." In one of his final points, he recognizes there is value in working for a successful company, "but you don't learn much, you learn when you are confronted with failure…you gotta feel it, if you're gonna learn it."

The video is only 8 minutes long, its an absolute must see: