In entrepreneurship high ratio of failure is so normal, so sometimes failure is not an option, but the way of failing is
Failing slow always the worst choice ever, it is like bleeding to death but it sometimes happens because lack of experience or escalation of commitment bias
Sometimes it is advisable to fail to stop the bleeding but failing too fast deprives very important advantages like:
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Digesting the learned lessons behind the failure which can help formulating the current strategies to turn the failure to success if that is feasible or at least preventing the same mistakes in the future
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Evaluating the current situation and what do you have in hand, and how can you utilize it for achieving a future success
So there must be enough determination to hang for a moment after seeing the failure coming to figure out how to obtain most benefits of the current situation not just shutdown and start over
True Story
The star of our story called Stewart Butterfield “yes the one you guessed”
The story chronologically as follows:
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2008: Butterfield left Yahoo
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2009: He started a new game “Glitch” within his new company, Tiny Speck
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2010: It was the expected release year of the game, but it did not
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2011: The game released, but just after 2 months turned to a beta release again, Tiny Speck announced more improvements to be applied
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2012: Butterfield announced the death of Glitch, as the Flash platform was already dying, but he mentioned Tiny Speck was still alive
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2013: An internal communications tool showed itself as noticeable light speck for Tiny Speck
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2014: The light speck start shining as it provides a full team collaborative solution at one place under the name of “Slack”, and Tiny Speck renamed to Slack Technologies
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2015: Slack evaluated nearly $3 billion
Conclusion
Mentioned story shows the failure of Glitch was not an option as it was a consequence of the Flash platform decay but talking about options, Butterfield had three alternatives:
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Fail Slow: keep working on Glitch and keep expending money, time and teamwork effort till death of Glitch and Tiny Speck, simply bleed to death
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Fail Fast: halting Glitch and start something else from scratch, or even take an radical decision of shutting down Tiny Speck altogether
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Fail Right: evaluate the situation and think how to get benefit of everything in hand, which Butterfield decided to pick and the result was a new success out of the failure, a new communication giant “Slack”