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Nicholas Hall has known success, but he's equally familiar with its close relative, failure. In the past eight years, the former president of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs says he has been involved with no fewer than six different companies, including a brewery and a business networking site. (His latest venture is Possibility Productions, a Hermosa Beach (Calif.)-based online deal broker of media, entertainment, and technology conferences, which he founded in 2001.)
But the serial entrepreneur is perhaps best known for a venture born out of failure, literally -- Startupfailures.com, a popular community Web site he started to chronicle the challenges of the entrepreneurial journey, as well as to provide encouragement and advice on how to get back on track. BusinessWeek Online reporter Stacy Perman recently spoke with Hall about the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, how to bounce back, and his belief that real failure comes from not trying. Edited excerpts of their conversion follow.
Q: You're a self-described serial entrepreneur. Do you consider that a sign of success or failure? A: It probably depends on what you're recognized for. For some entrepreneurs, their strength comes from turning around a company, and some are strong in getting excited about an idea and moving it forward, but the day-to-day management is not their strength. Am I a serial entrepreneur? Yes, that's where my passion and energy is. It's the way my mind operates -- I'm always thinking about how to make things better and develop something new. But anybody who has had success has always had failures.
Q: Why did you launch Startupfailures.com? A: At the time [2000] a lot of my peers felt like people raising venture capital was a measure of success. There were all of these stories around us for these ideas [that were being funded], and we were scratching our heads: We were competent and smart and wanted to know what it was that we were missing and why we were struggling. A lot of us put a ton money on our credit cards and were putting off life [hoping] to strike gold.
The site became more an authentic conversation about what we were going through. There was a journey in being an entrepreneur. It was about going through failure and bouncing back. Are you going to bounce back and take the chance to go to bat again, or let this failure stop you? If you look at all of the ultimate success stories, both personally and professionally, they all had to bounce back at one time or another.
Q: Why do people focus more on success? A: When I was getting Startupfailures.com off the ground, I had a community of experts to ask questions. I was hoping to get a venture capitalist. The feedback I got from them was that they loved what I was doing but didn't want to be associated with failure. It's a double-edged sword.
There's no question that when you look back at people who ultimately have considerable success in business that they have definitely gone through a lot of failures. Any successful person's bio doesn't say "Here are the successes and failures." Magically, they feature the successes and mitigate some of the failures. In the business world, over time, most businesses are not successful.
Q: What can you learn from failure that you can't from success? A: Nobody wants to be a failure. At the same time, there's no better education for an entrepreneur than failure. You can go to Harvard or Stanford, but that's not where you get your education. That's where you build relationships, but it's not what teaches you to have whatever it takes to get through whatever you need to go through to build a startup.
Q: Can you have success without failure? A: No, I don't think so. I just don't know anyone, even if their first startup company was successful, that didn't bang their head plenty of times. Many went through failures in order to find success. Even the Microsofts and the Apples all had intermittent failures along the way.
You can have success day in and out, but I've found that to sustain the energy and enthusiasm that's going to get you farther, you have to deal with more no's then yes's. You need both, there's no question. But plenty of people [experiencing] startup failures understand that failure is a part of the process -- they just hope they can skip it. It's not like you go out and say, "I'll have two failures and then have success."
Q: What's the biggest lesson you learned from failing? A: How costly it is if you take yourself out of the game. It's like what they say about the stock market -- that you don't know when the gains will come, but you get luckier often if you stay in the game vs. trying to figure out when to get in the game. If you fail, you have to bounce back.
Q: But once burned, aren't most people hesitant to try again? A: Unfortunately, that's the way human beings tend to be wired. We take something from the past, tried that, and it didn't work. There's a tendency over time for what's possible to be achieved to be diminished. [People see] the future as getting smaller and limited. It really depends literally on how you're going to wear those glasses. Are they rose-colored or dark shades? Are you going to see what you have gone through as something to empower you or to limit you? No is temporary, yes is temporary, it's all temporary.
Q: What's the biggest hurdle to bouncing back? A: Self-doubt. All of the biggest hurdles are internal.
Q: Does it ever become easier to fail? A: What does become easier is to bounce back. That's really the most important thing -- to get back up at the plate and to start to understand over time it's just part of the process. And that you have to stay in the game, you don't have more time. You've got right now. The next second is a crap shoot.
Edited by Rod Kurtz
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