A few weeks ago at Grand Central Tech, a sleek, loft-like business incubator in midtown Manhattan, Laura Moreno Cabanillas, an entrepreneur born and raised in Spain, spoke about her childhood and her desire to work for his own. “Ever since I was a teenager, all I wanted to do was start my own business,” she said. “But everyone around me, all my family and friends told me, ‘Please get a government job like everyone else.’ »
Moreno Cabanillas was participating in a panel discussion for Internet Week, the annual celebration of New York City’s digital scene. According to an April 2014 report, report according to the New York State Comptroller’s Office, technology is one of the city’s fastest-growing industries: in the four years preceding the study, the tech industry created more than twenty -five thousand jobs, with an average salary, in 2012, of more than one hundred and eighteen thousand dollars per year. Internet Week, run by business publisher Crain Communications, is delighted with this triumph. Comedian Hannibal Buress hosted the invitation-only Webby Awards, held to recognize achievement on the Internet. Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, the stars of “Big city”, talked about their leap from the web to global domination. Big Data guru Nate Silver spoke with NY1’s Pat Kiernan. And there have been many parties and get-togethers, all based on the success of the industry and the opportunities it offers.
The event that brought Moreno Cabanillas to Grand Central Tech, however, was different. Organized in part by the Young Professionals Division of the Americas Society, the event was titled “Failing to Succeed” and addressed the flip side of entrepreneurship. Among the panelists who joined Moreno Cabanillas was John Qualter, the American-born co-founder of a 3D body mapping platform called BioDigital. When he mentioned that his friends and family had thought that, despite the risks, it was very cool that he was starting his own business, Moreno Cabanillas rolled his eyes. A third panel member, Leonardo Mirón, a Mexican entrepreneur raised in France, explained Moreno Cabanillas’ discomfort. “In French and Mexican culture, failure is completely taboo,” he said. “You can’t fail and talk about it.”
In the United States, talking about failure is something of a cottage industry. Although Americans frequently report, by Yoda, that we are a nation of successful people, from another point of view, we are a nation of failures – people who abandoned their way of life elsewhere to start a new one here. Discussions on the subject are far from verboten; indeed, it is often celebrated as a means to achieve a more ambitious goal, notably in Silicon Valley, where “fail quickly, fail often” is basically a mantra. We love talking about failure so much that Cassie Phillipps, founder with Diane Loviglio of FailCon, an annual experience conference that began in San Francisco in 2009, took a break last year because she felt that the subject had become so banal as to make the gathering superfluous. (She still licenses the concept, and there have been FailCons around the world.)
At Grand Central Tech, non-US panelists shared their stories of business disasters and what they learned from them. Moreno Cabanillas mentioned that he worked in Turkey but did not speak Turkish and he recalled a time when, as a neophyte minerals trader, the sale of a few thousand tons of iron ore went wrong. That incident ended, she said, with “the shipment being chased with a very angry Chinese customer in the back of the car.” The important lesson, she added, is to learn “to wake up the next morning like nothing happened” and try again. Mirón revealed that his first startup, a program to fund music education in Mexico’s public schools, collapsed after pushing his staff too hard. “I started burning the team. I pushed and pushed them,” he said. “Realizing that your partners and your team want to quit is like a big punch in the head.”
Discussions about failure are perhaps easier in the United States, in part because our business people are so good at it. The failure rate for startups, assuming investors lose everything (i.e. all company assets are liquidated), is between thirty and forty percent, according to Shikhar Ghosh , lecturer at Harvard Business School. The rate is seventy to eighty percent if failure is defined as projected return on investment, and ninety to ninety-five percent if measured by the fact of not exceed a declared projection.