Embracing Failure

It’s beautiful to see creating glorified. The combination of marketplaces like Etsy, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, and education from the likes of Instructables and Brit+Co empower creatives with more tools than ever. Both the maker and hacker movements have also done wonders in breaking down the fear in starting something new.

But it’s equally important to be fearless about failing as you are about creating. Knowing when to let something go is one of the toughest parts of both startups and life.

Letting Go

In the summer of 2014, I joined two ambitious and talented friends, Jay Deuskar and Chintan Parikh as a cofounder of Cappio. We started to the company with a grand vision of creating an automated research assistant that would simplify investing for the everyman.

We were fortunate enough to have a lot of early traction that was able to give us some direction. It’s amazing to look back and see that thousands of people have been touched your work. But launching is only part of the equation, scaling impact is an uphill battle.

Today, I want to finally come to terms with letting go of Cappio. Planning to do a more thorough post-mortem in the future to share learnings on why it didn’t work out. For now, I will say as founders we wanted to power on but every startup needs founders who deeply believe their mission. We really just got to a point that we no longer lived and breathed the company. This post is more of a meditation on emotions surrounding failure and failing with honor.

Facing the Fear

It’s likely that every hero you’ve looked up to has failed many, many times. And yes, 90+% of startups of fail. By now, every entrepreneur knows that failure is the norm but the biggest challenge is still facing failure when it comes. I hope to post a more thoughtful post-mortem with learning but first it’s a mindset adjustment. Changing my perspective from fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Treating each project like an experiment to collect data and learn from. Be a success seeker not a failure avoider.

Fortunately destigmatizing failure is a growing movement that this is becoming common knowledge. So much so that you there are kitschy mantras like Fail Fast and Fail Better. There’s even a FailCon dedicated to entrepreneurs and creators sharing war stories.

Shutting the company down in the right way and giving up is not the same thing… Fail with honor. Hold your head up with pride. Treat people well. Be honest. No delusion. No lying. No spinning… live to fight another day.

What’s Next

Working on Cappio has been an amazing experience, however it’s important for us to close this chapter so that we can shift focus onto other opportunities. Instead of holding onto a sideproject that gets neglected, we wanted to hand off the company to people still innovating in the space. Over the last couple of months, we have been tying up loose ends on working with Simply Wall St to acquire Cappio for its assets.

Simply Wall St has a very similar vision and values to Cappio — Al and his team there are working hard to simplifying long term investing by turning complicated financial data into readable infographics. I’m grateful that there are others out there who are stepping up to the challenge and see a future where technology can help investors like you and me make better decisions.

As for me, I’ll be doing my best to make this transition smooth for anyone still using Cappio and better documenting the learnings from our journey. Look forward to focusing more on my writing, blockchain strategy consulting and researching Startup Studios. In the meantime, I hope you can also take a moment to look your own past failures as beautiful learning experiences.

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Incredibly grateful for my friends and family for all the continued support. Special thanks to Adam Lieberman for his involvement and contributions to Cappio. You are amazingly diligent and intelligent, glad to have worked together.

Further reading and watching:

Kato and Vyrtex are two shining examples that come to mind of companies failing with honor. So much props to you guys for your candidness.

CB Insights analysis of 156 startup failures. Wealth of info worth looking at for any entrepreneur for perspective.

Mark Suster brings important counterarguments to the Fail Fast culture in his post on why he thinks the Fail Fast mantra needs to die.