No one cares that your business failed

I can say that because I have seen businesses succeed and fail from my seat as an underwriter, and I have watched founders carry both outcomes like they were verdicts on who they are. Entrepreneurship should not define who you are as a person or what you are worth. A failed business is not a sentence, as long as it was not built on anything illegal, but we treat failure like one, and too many founders feel shame admitting that a business did not work.

The beauty of building a business is that you learn. Sometimes the lessons are expensive, but you learn either way. Social media has made us feel like we always need to be successful and always show the best face, so we have become a society that puts up a front of all good and never bad, and we all know that is not true.

More often than not, the reality of a business is that it is going to be hard, and failure is the probable outcome, for many reasons, including luck. Social media influencers teach us to be optimistic and to hold a mindset that we will win, but if we are not doing our due diligence, finding our blind spots, and learning along the way, we end up in situations we do not want to be in, repeating mistakes we do not want to repeat.

Then there are the stupid expenses we are told to pay when starting a business: incorporating, filing trademarks, expensive legal paperwork for the next raise. In reality, none of that matters until you have enough data and enough money to justify the expense.

We glorify the raises when we should be glorifying the client testimonials, the impact we are having on society, and the clients we serve who preach to the world about our product. We adulterate the whole research process so people tell us what we want to hear, instead of going out into the wild and figuring out what the problem actually is by observing.

None of this comes from someone pretending to have a great success story. I have not sold a company for millions of dollars, and I have not taken one public. I speak from my experience in a startup world where there is so much entitlement and fronting, and not much substance.

So what is the definition of success in building a business? Is it selling for millions of dollars? Is it going public? Or is it serving clients and making them happy every time they interact with our products? Maybe selling a company for millions is a byproduct of doing great business. I am not sure. What I do know is that we put a lot of emphasis on raising money, and we miss the plot along the way.

This is an expression of frustration, because I have spent time chasing things I should not have chased. The moment my son was born, I realized that building a business means nothing if I cannot enjoy life with my wife and son. Building a business is simply a means to an end. It is not the end itself. I do not do business for the love of the game, because that is too egotistical for my taste. I like business because it can serve as a creative outlet and a way to build a source of income I can use for my family.

I may have more to say about this topic, but for now I am done.