Adam Green and Adam Bosworth on Failure
I received a lot of interesting and positive feedback on my post on talking about failure. There’s no question that enlightened entrepreneurs get the value of failure and generally enlightened people have noticed the absence of VCs (and entrepreneurs) publicly talking about it for a variety of reasons.
Adam Green pointed me at a podcast he did with Adam Bosworth (now at Google) discussing his lessons learned from the failure of Reflex. I hadn’t thought of Analytica / Reflex for a long time (I had an original copy and loved it) – and subsequently discovered this useful essay about it on the web.
Here’s the Cliff Notes version of Bosworth’s lessons learned:
1. Don’t invent a category, then extend and embrace a category
2. Have no limits in terms of storage, no limits in programmability
4. Do whatever it takes to make it easy–don’t be a purist
OK, I can’t type. Make that:
1. Don’t invent a category; embrace and extend a category
2. Have no limits in terms of storage, no limits in programmability
3. Do whatever it takes to make it easy–don’t be a purist