Cultivating failure

I tend to excel at standardized tests. It is how current education system and society define success. People with good scores are entitled great incentives for their "merits" (sometimes as the loss to people who can't keep up in the system). The definition of "merits" then comes under my analysis. Would we limit definition of "merits" to just the scores of standardized tests? And let others fail?

I have spent my life, it seems, in and around schools. For complicated reasons, I attended a score of them, both in the United States and abroad; I taught in Louisiana and Los Angeles for more than a decade; I have volunteered in all sorts of schools, and am now a mother of elementary-school students. I have never seen an entire school system as fundamentally broken and rudderless as the California public schools, a system in which one out of five high-school students drops out before graduation, and in which scarcely 60 percent of the African American and Hispanic students leave school with a diploma. These young people are cast adrift in a $50 billion system in which failure is almost a foregone conclusion.

Above is an abstract from an article (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/school-yard-garden) by an educator highlighting how the education system determine "failure" instead of educating all in benefit of society.

In my opinion, society is like lotuses in a pond; only when water-level comes up, lotuses could rise. It is not so wise to polarize individuals just with results of standardized tests.

Failure as a strategy

Quite an ironic angle of view at making failure. I stumbled upon two examples where such strategy is being used.

"Joyful failures" at IDEO: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fast-company-staff/fast-company-blog/failure-success-strategy

Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I have merely found 10,000 ways that won't work."
...
British entrepreneur James Dyson reports that he built 5,127 prototypes of his cyclonic vacuum before getting to one that was commercially successful.

Al Qaeda's potential use of failure as a strategy in recent Nigerian belt bomber case: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/failure-as-a-strategy.html

If al Qaeda did embrace failure as a strategy, we could expect them to:

 

  • Increase the frequency.  Since the level of effort required is very small, do more to generate substantive returns in red ink/securitization/bureaucratization.  Since suicide isn't even a requirement for the attacker, it would likely make it easy to hire them (payment to families for the effort would attract a vast pool of applicants).
  • Expand the venues.  Attack more types of places.  Schools, malls, etc.  Terrorist attacks are treated differently than even much more violent attacks by postal citizens in the same venues.  Why?  They are outsiders and the fear is that these attacks will be systemic rather than one offs.
  • Embrace more ethnicities/races to expand the profile of the terrorist.  The use of a Nigerian student is a first step on this.  Expand this profile to include Chinese, Indonesians, etc. to generate sweeping fear of all "outsiders."  Spread the bureaucratic restrictions on travel that would be generated in reactions to these attacks far and wide.    
As I have mentioned earlier, take on failure as a strategy could be extreme despite it merits. However, the essence is in embracing and accepting failures as part of achieving successes.

Also it is good to note that disruptive technologies during their inception are usually dismissed as FAIL.

bank failures

I totally disgust how loopholes in banking industry fail the whole society.

Leverages (investment tools?) are boasted as if new groundbreaking technologies found to help humanity.

In fact, those are just ploys to deceive people who have no means to understand at all. I bet bankers themselves have little clues too.

Now taxpayers money are used to save those big banks that some suggest now is the good time to start a bank.

Anyway, check out the video visualizing bank failures:

Crunchpad fails

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I ain't a gadget guy but this gadget intrigues me because Michael Arrington shares development process in detail. It got yummier when Mike enlisted a Singapore startup to do product development.

18 months of work with so much potential, Mike broke the news:

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication

I am interested to find out who the shareholders are and also why Mike, as a lawyer himself, overlooked legal issues.

Most important of all, a very fine case study for failure.

First they came...

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew; 
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

a popular poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

It seems simple but it exactly describes where apathy would lead to...

The poem is from Nazi era's genocide. And it depicts well of the cause of Khmer Rouge era's genocide; leading Cambodia back to Year Zero in 1975.

While, sympathy (and empathy) is the foundation of humanity, apathy is the cause of failure in humanity. And it is why we must speak up for the powerless.

Visualizing fall of empires

I guess fall of empire is fine example of a type of failure. I am pretty interested in learning the rise and demise of powerful empires.

Here is a nice video of visualizing fall of four maritime empires

more info here:

Living in an ancient city of Angkor, being surrounded by its remnants, I wonder how exactly it fell. 

Once upon a time, Khmer empire grew; empowered by its impressive water management systems which are still functional to date. The city now has problem controlling its sewage system.

Another empire I am interested in is Mongol empire which occupied half the world at its height.

There are a lot of things to learn from history. One thing I learn is the certainty of impermanence.

orderly failure?

The Buck Stops Here - Harry S. Truman Presiden...

From the Truman Presidential Library by Marshall Astor

We’re commencing an “orderly shutdown” of Lookery. We made the decision as late as possible without forgoing our responsibilities to the various stakeholders, including and especially orderly disengagement from our customers. We’re honored by their attention and support and regret that we couldn’t have served them even better and for much, much longer.

I left Wouldery out of the post title as it’s not relevant. The only information of value is what other choices were readily available to us and which ones I look back on with uncertainty. This is probably not my last public postmortem on the lessons learned, but I owe everyone near-immediate disclosure on the things I can put my finger on now. I’m trying to keep a stiff upper lip during this process. Please avert your eyes if I falter.

As co-founder and CEO of Lookery, the buck stops with me and no one else. I hope to have the opportunity to work again with each and every one of the dozen people who worked at Lookery since it was founded in July 2007. I hope I did as well by them as they did by Lookery and by me. Please take this post as a recommendation of each and all of them and never hesitate to get in touch with me for details. The huge majority of them went well beyond the call of duty to try and make the company succeed.

So did Allen Morgan, the outside Director that represented the Preferred investors. There’s no way we could have gotten this far or known how to behave well in the face of adversity without his guidance. He represented a great batch of angel investors on our Board and was one of the main reasons that they were so supportive of the company whenever I asked for anything. In May and June of this year, most of them agreed to participate in an inside round to keep us running through the next series of milestones. I cancelled the transaction a month ago, as I could not be as confident of reaching those milestones as ‘good faith’ requires.

Before delving into our market and product choices, I need to address our fundraising overall. On forming the company, David and I decided to pursue a low-cap model, postponing institutional investor involvement for the foreseeable future. It really sucks to be here right now, but I think it was the right call. Resigning politely at someone else’s behest, as I’ve done twice before, did not improve any of the stakeholders prospects in either case. Unless Lookery reached an expansion stage, where the sales model was known and repeatable, I’m ever-more convinced that raising institutional capital would not have increased our chances of creating value for the existing shareholders. The company would have survived longer, but that’s not the goal.

Going low-cap, David and I were careful to create a parsimonious and headcount-spare operation. Operating virtually was not a problem, nor was cutting corners on travel, schwag, and office rent. And, I’ll still only work on cloud-hosted businesses. Those parts of Lookery were appropriate, repeatable, and did not bring us to this point. We did invest too much in building market share in the original ad-network business in the first half of 2008, but that error was a symptom rather than the disease.

Moving on to our specific coulda-shoulda product and market choices, there are three key moments at which a different and defensible decision might have made all the difference. In chronological order, the sins Lookery committed under my leadership were continuing our dependency on a large partner (March 2008), not knowing when to cut bait on a failing asset (September 2008), and building ahead of the market (December 2008). I and we made any number of other mistakes, but all the rest were correctable. Avoiding even one of the three big errors might have been enough to get us over the hump.

I believe David and I started Lookery in July 2007 in the right way and for the right reasons. Based partially on my F8-launch work for LendingClub (a company I’m thrilled to know) David and I decided to quickly offer a no-frills banner network for Facebook app publishers. We went from commitment to live service in well under two weeks using AWS and OpenAds, pulled in Rex Dixon almost immediately to manage the publishers and Todd Sawicki soon thereafter as we needed a real ad pro. Both David and I had been keen observers of, and vendors to, the online ad business from the outside, and Todd was the online advertising insider that completed the early team. By March 1, 2008, we were getting pretty close to a billion impressions a week, had moved the ad ops to Atlas, started spec’ing Lookery’s targeting technology, and closed out a $1M convertible note financing that had been rolling in since October.

So far so good on using an ephemeral opportunity to create a company, but this is where I place Coulda-Shoulda #1. We exposed ourselves to a huge single point of failure called Facebook. I’ve ranted for years about how bad an idea it is for startups to be mobile-carrier dependent. In retrospect, there is no difference between Verizon Wireless and Facebook in this context. To succeed in that kind of environment requires any number of resources. One of them is clearly significant outside financing, which we’d explicitly chosen to do without. We could have and should have used the proceeds of the convertible note to get out from under Facebook’s thumb rather to invest further in the Facebook Platform.

Coulda-Shoulda #2. Predictably and reasonably, Facebook acted in their own interest rather than ours. Their Summer 2008 redesign supported Facebook’s goals elegantly but hurt our publishers and us in ways that became clear just weeks after we’d raised another ~$2M. At this point, we made a mistake endemic to startup people. We followed our natural inclination as problem solvers rather than getting out while the getting was good. If we’d sold the ad network the minute we understood that we could no longer make it successful, we would have saved a couple hundred thousand dollars in working capital. Plus, the ad network would have fetched three to five times its low-six figure sale price less than 60 days later. That’s a million dollar mistake I made in a very short period of time. I should understand sunk costs better than this.

To give credit where it’s due, Todd closed the sale of the Lookery ad network to AdKnowledge in less than two weeks from the moment we decided it had to go. I was off promoting Lookery’s targeting system to European demographic data sources and social networks and was not even in the country during those two weeks.

Coulda-Shoulda #3. Once we sold the ad network, I fell into a bad old habit — persuading my team to build something before the market was ready for it. Oren usually saves me from myself in this regard, but I didn’t pull him away from Mashery for the day or two necessary to diagnose the problem. Mashery is doing so well that I clearly could have. Lookery’s Profile SaaS/universal cookie mechanism is far more economic and effective than cookie exchange systems in a world where ad media and targeting data are separate commodities. That world is a year or more in the future.

This is the fourth blog post that I can find from a Lookery exec in which the primary theme is early = wrong. I felt pretty good when I wrote this one in December 2007 when Lookery was still doing all the right aka solely tactical things; the issue was weighing on me last month as I started to wonder if Lookery’s inside round was a bad idea; but it hurts the worst to read this post of Todd Sawicki’s from the day we met four months before Lookery was even founded.

Within the bounds of confidentiality agreements and showing respect for the many people who treated Lookery and me well over the past two years, I’m happy to respond to any questions that arise. My replies may sometimes take a day or two.

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cleverly titled: Couldery Shouldery

a great startup built up quickly from an opensource ad platform amid social graph hype...

brutally honest confession... a lot to learn from...

a great example of feasible scenario if a business depends on another company's platform - facebook

however, on another hand, Admob which focuses on Apple's mobile platform made a homerun today... just google it for more info...

(my confession: more regular posts coming soon... holiday ends today...)

Starting with failure - another side of failure

Finally, I am starting my blog. I will be writing on various topics but with focus on failure, entrepreneurship and activism.

My first post will be about one of my favorite speeches. It is by JK Rowling who wrote top hit Harry Potter series.

I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

Full transcript here: http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination

Failures are usually ridiculed instead of being embraced, especially in Asian society. As a result, consequences of a failure are exaggerated exacerbated.

As Ms Rowling has pointed out, there is silver lining in a failure, there is another perspective to a failure. Only through failures, lessons are learned, skin is thickened, excess is shed, and stamina is toughened.

Fear for failures would be counter-productive. As long as failure is not embraced, we would be just prisoners of this fear.

I have learnt it with a serious setback. Failure - here I come.