Dick Costolo, the CEO of FeedBurner, has another awesome post up titled Too Many Companies?? 

He starts with the observation:

“There aren’t “too many companies in the market right now”. Even if there are 90,000 more companies, there still aren’t too many companies. Neither is there too much capital or too little capital or not enough engineers in this market. There are only specific market forces that you should weigh vis-a-vis your specific company.”

and ends with the conclusion:

“The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about “there are a bunch of reasons i might fall off” and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.”

Jason Wood has an interesting post up titled Failure: Can fearing it impede professional greatness?  It’s consistent with the title of his blog (The Ponderings of Woodrow) – really good ponderings on failure here.

Business 2.0 has a good article titled A startup’s best friend? Failure.  on how to succeed by paying attention and responding to failure.  Dogster, Google, and Riya (Like.com) are profiled.  I got plenty of chuckles after I made an investment in Dogster.  I look forward to the day when I can say “look who’s barking now.”

It happens all the time.  You do something, don’t think hard about the implications of it, and then realize that you’ve “stepped in shit.”  I can’t count the number of times I’ve done this in business over the last 20+ years – at least I know how to clean my sneakers off quickly and efficiently.

Earlier today I had a phone call with an exec from one of my portfolio companies.  He did something recently that could only be characterized as stepping in shit. It ultimately came back around to me because of the various people involved.  It wasn’t a major thing (stepping in shit never is), but it was unpleasant, a little messy, and smelled bad.  My reaction – when I heard about it – was similar to the one I have after the aforementioned physical event.

We had a great, short talk.  He quickly got the implications of what he did, realized it wasn’t appropriate, and took corrective action.  But – more importantly – I think he learned from it.

Stepping in shit doesn’t hurt, isn’t life or death, but is unpleasant.  Learning how to walk a little more carefully through a field that is regularly visited by dogs is a healthy thing.

Last night at dinner Howard, Jason, Amy, Elizabeth, and I were discussing the JetBlue meltdown from last week (that continues today.)  The most bizarre thing to me was the relatively weak response from David Neeleman – the CEO – who is known for being outspoken, direct, and clear minded even in a difficult situation.  This morning’s New York Times finally has a strong quote from him in which he says he is mortified after fliers are stranded.

In this article, Neeleman shows he is very aware how badly JetBlue has screwed up dealing with this situation.  The article states “Mr. Neeleman said he would enact what he called a customer bill of rights that would financially penalize JetBlue — and reward passengers — for any repeat of the current upheaval. He said he would propose a plan to pay customers, after some amount of time, by the hour for being stranded on a plane.”

In addition to finally speaking up, Neeleman is quoted as saying “I can flap my lips all I want. Talk is cheap. Watch us.”

Shortly after reading the NY Times JetBlue article, I came across Sagi Rubin’s post titled A great startup CEO comparable in which he reminded us of the management greatness of Winston Wolf.

“So, pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fucking car.”  I sure hope Neeleman has a Winston Wolf on his team to help him deliver on his promises.

A reader pointed me at this good, short post describing the shutdown of a service.  Failure is a part of the entrepreneurial experience and it’s even more valuable (although not necessarily fun) if you can learn a lesson from it.  The lesson here – well articulated by the author – is that he failed to address a point of pain.

I haven’t written much on failure since December so I was delighted to see several really insightful posts on the benefits and chocolatey goodness of failing.  It started with Jeremy Liew’s (a partner at Lightspeed) post titled Failure IS an option.   James Hong (the cofounder of HOTorNOT) followed up with a post titled Do YOU have the balls to try? Part 1 and Robert Young finished it off with a guest column on GigaOm titled Bankruptcy: The Opportunity to Fail.  Just remember – failure and success go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

In 1983, when I was a senior in high school, I started my first company.  There were six founders – they are the gang below:

John Gruberman, Drew Debelak, Jeff Funkhouser, Steve?, Kent Ellington, and me (the smiling dude holding up the book on the bottom right.)  I can’t remember the name of the company, but it was probably something clever.  I’m 99% sure the book Kent (middle / bottom) is holding up is something about incorporating your business. 

We’d cooked up some idea around Dungeons and Dragons, the game us little nerd boys played while we weren’t eating at Taco Bueno, listening to Rush, playing with our computers (Kent and I programmed a killer Yahtzee game on the TI Personal Computer which “accidentally” got shipped on their “auxiliary program” disk – Kent’s dad was the product manager before joining Compaq at the very beginning), or pretending to chase girls.

At some point, my other five partners decided to kick me out of the business for some reason – I think it was because they were all going to UT Austin and I wasn’t.  I remember not being very happy with most of them (except Kent) for a while.  I went to live in Boston, they went to live in Austin, and we basically went our separate ways. 

I often forget about this being my very first company and often refer to Martingale Software (also a failure) as my first company.  I guess I’ll call this one my Zero-ith company.

David Cohen has a great post up about the failure of one of his startup - iContact.  Even though iContact failed, David and his partners still managed to return 78% of the investment to their investors.  His two lessons: (1) control the distribution of your product and (2) start small and prove something before you start to scale up.

Failure can be “positive” – John Funk at Evergreen IP is about to start writing about a project he and his partners just killed.  Understanding why things don’t work – and then doing something about it – has always been a key part of the entrepreneurial process (at least mine.)  Part of the premise of John’s business is that a lot of projects that they take on will fail – I expect he’ll have some powerful insights to share.