Startup Failure: A Middle Eastern Taboo
Failing is one of life’s tough lessons that everyone has to endure, it's a fact of life. You will have to fail sooner or later even if you were the brightest strongest smartest most charismatic person on earth, you will fail at something. There is no way around that. You can’t be the best at everything, not from the start and surely not forever. That’s the harsh truth of life.
Humans fear the unknown. Our natural response is rejecting change or anything new. Perhaps its a defence mechanism to protect what we have or what we know. When you look at people that changed the world with products, ideologies, and even religion, and read about their struggle. You will find that they all have one thing in common, they all failed at something at least once. When it comes to business, in this part of the world, to fail is closer to social suicide than to bankruptcy. Startups fail all the time in Silicon Valley and in Europe. A VC once told me in my twenties “if you don’t have failures in your record, big failures that everyone knew about, you will have trouble raising money at your age”. I was 27.
You will have to fail sooner or later even if you were the brightest strongest smartest most charismatic person on earth, you will fail at something.
Failing at a business in the MENA region is inevitable like any other region, however, that’s a cloud that will hang around over an entrepreneur’s head for quite a while, sometimes maybe forever. Gossip sadly is part of the culture. We love discussing people, and although I hate it, I find myself doing it sometimes unintentionally. We long for drama, and failure in business is drama people pay attention to for the wrong reasons.
In the west, a quick failure, especially in a venture or a startup is celebrated. They look at as a fast harsh lesson, they encourage you to just dust yourself off, and on to the next venture. Here however, an entrepreneur would rather live in denial for years and keep everything looking sound in hopes of a miracle, although you would find that in most cases, the entrepreneur knew 6 months in advance that his/her startup was bound to fail. They keep these zombie startups alive instead of mercy killing them just to protect themselves from society. You can’t blame them though, they fear if someone heard of their failure in this startup they wouldn’t support or fund their next venture because it will reflect badly on their record as an entrepreneur.
Its known globally that most startups fail because of lack of funding, I, however, don’t see that this necessarily applies to this part of the world. You might think I’ve gone crazy right about now, but let me explain. Startups in the region still need more funding, I fully support that , and I am vocal about it every time and everywhere I can be. However, we lack innovation and original ideas that really have an impact on how people live their lives. The age of localising or cloning (Locacloning) validated ideas from the west is over. The world is becoming smaller by the minute, and technology adaptation is higher now than its ever been. Most startups from silicon valley that launch now have global domination in their minds from day one, and reach every continent in less than 2 years, where before it took them at least 5. Language is no longer that big of a barrier, and Internet speeds are increasing year by year due telecom wars and their increase reliance on selling Data plans. To look at funding as major reason startups fail in this part of the world would be wrong, why you ask? Because we have well funded startups that came out from the MENA region, but they were locaclones of well funded unicorn startups in Silicon Valley. This proves that funding is not the issue; investors in this part of the world rather place their bet on a validated clone than a innovative startup that might or might not disrupt an industry. I will not write more about this subject on this article for this deserves an article on its own.
The age of localising or cloning (Locacloning) validated ideas from the west is over.
It’s simple, lessons need to be learned, and you will not learn unless you fail. We learnt this as kids, when we started walking or riding a bike, we had to fall first. The more vocal you are about your failures, the less people will care about them, that’s a fact. The knowledge you will share with people about your failures will help the community so others won’t fall in the same mistakes you did once. This will better the ecosystem as a whole. I personally failed more times than I like, failure has a bitter long lasting taste that stays with you till you succeed, but the only reason you push yourself harder in the next venture, is because you learn that it will only go away once you do. I urge entrepreneurs to challenge themselves and try to solve a problem in any industry in an innovative way, don’t just clone to feel safe, don’t fear failure or care what society thinks of you, your peers would understand and respect you if you fail, and after a while everyone would. At least if you fail trying something new, you will lay the grounds and inspire someone else. All you have to do is your research and then try again, just don’t give up simply because you failed, then you won’t be worthy of calling yourself an entrepreneur.
The only way to break a taboo forever is to change how we feel about it first, only then will society understand that it’s ok to fail. You change society by example, not by your opinion.
