I follow Vator.tv which is focused primarily on west coast technology businesses. It provides a lot of great content from entrepreneurs that have started businesses, some of which you might have heard of and others that are more under the radar. The founder of Vator is Bambi Francisco Roizen is a former columnist/correspondent at Dow Jones MarketWatch turned entrepreneur. I highly recommend that you follow activity on Vator if you have or are interested in business start-up.
Bambi recently posted a series of interview with Eric Ries, author of the "Start-Up Lessons Learned" blog. In the attached video Eric talks about "failure" and why it happens to all of us and is a prerequisite to learning. He also shares his top three lessons to entrepreneurs.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Eric is right about the necessity and advantages of learning from failure. I invested 5 years in a startup that in the end, was not as successful as it might have been. It wasn’t a total failure, but there were enough failure markers along the way to make it feel like it. We eventually sold and the company is still in business, but I’ve never thought of it as a success. What was and is a great success from that experience though, is what I’ve learned both during and since that time. I learned more through that prolonged struggle than I had in 15 years previously of working for large companies. I’ve made a point of evaluating my experiences, my mistakes, the mistakes of others, and our successes in the larger context of my career and in the context of my current work. On the basis of that learning, I would do it all over again and learn even more. I am and will be much more successful in my career than I would have been without the failure and the conscious effort to learn.
Posted by: Rickcoplin.blogspot.com | June 16, 2010 at 02:36 PM