You’ll fail… so what?

In Others by Sébastien FluryLeave a Comment

If you’re planning to start a business, you probably know that the odds are big that you’ll fail your venture. Or if you don’t know it, wake up. There are many smart guys out there who did many things right and finally failed their startup. You’ve probably heard about these statistics: on 10 investments, only one will be a big success, 2-3 will reimburse the investment and all the other ones will be worthless. What can be scary is that it only takes into account the funded startups. But how many get financing? One on ten?

If we take these (probably wrong) numbers as a basis to evaluate your success chance, we can assume that you have a 3-4% of beeing financially OK with the company you’re putting in so many efforts. OK, here, I’m consciously neglecting lifestyle business (you’re bulding a viable company where you don’t need investors and you don’t want / care growing big and fast – what is ABSOLUTELY OK, too!).

With this in mind, why do people start a company? You have to be a bit crazy to build a startup, that’s true. That doesn’t seem rational and you better should find a safe job in a bank… but hey, who told you there are still safe jobs? Except if you’re working in the administration or governmental companies (and even there…), there are no more safe job in 2013!

I think, and most of fellow entrepreneurs I’ve talked to, that the journey is so exciting and rewarding that it’s worth the potentially painful outcome. If you never try, you will never know if the amazing concept you’ve developed (with you and yourself) even has a chance to succeed. As well as it intellectually exciting and rewarding to brainstorm about game-changing concepts, it’s even more to take the next step: implementing it.

Even if you fail your startup, you will have learnt so many things that you can’t consider it badly (OK, financially speaking, it could be disastrous).

11 months ago, I’ve blogged about success tolerance  and failure acceptance (“What we still need to change”). I wasn’t thinking that this simple post would trigger guys to start something. Following the post, French startup activist and blogger Roxanne Varza commented and asked me if I didn’t wanted to launch a Fail Conference in Switzerland. And then we started the discussion with some of my readers.

David Butler, a startup activist and great networker based in Zürich, took the leadership to organize the first FailCon Switzerland, which will happen on 16th April in Zürich! David has assembled a little team to organize it and together, they’ve convinced some well-known Swiss entrepreneurs (like serial entrepreneur Dorian Selz) to share their experience. The one-day conference will gather a few hundreds entrepreneurs, investors and innovators. There are many aspects of failures and this uncommon event will bring you an opportunity to learn from guys who failed and recovered.

This event is a first step in the change of mentality we need to see here in Switzerland. Failing should be widely accepted and seen as it is: a huge opportunity to learn and become stronger!

So… what are you waiting for? Spread the word and register!