Decoding #MakeMistakes

It was just a few of us back in 2007 at True Sparrow.. Sunil, Ajay, Deepa and I. Balakrishna had just joined us. That was the time that I put up the Make Mistakes board against the green wall in our office. Both that board and that idea has stayed with me since then.

We have always been product people first, and then engineers or designers. Always! It was true when we were a 5 people team building the very first viral facebook app in 2007. It was true when we were a 150 people team building Fab. And it is true even now when we are just getting started with Folly. We have always been product people. And it is in this context that you need to understand #MakeMistakes and what it stands for.

#MakeMistakes prods you to recognise the freedom to make mistakes as the best possible way to push yourself out of your comfort zone and truly innovate; to see mistakes as opportunities and not as failures; to perhaps be humbled, but not disheartened by your mistakes; to not be embarrassed by your mistakes, to not look for excuses for your mistakes, instead, to be bold, confident, and responsible; to own up your mistakes, to reflect, and be better prepared for the next time; to speak up, to question, and to challenge; to dream, and to aspire; to share your learnings, and help others learn from your mistakes; to put the safeguards in place to ensure that the same mistake is not repeated again; to be resilient, to be able to quickly recover and spring back from your mistakes.

At Folly Systems, Make Mistakes is integral to achieving our vision to be the company where the best developers and product people in the world want to work. We are committed to an environment where mistakes are celebrated; where mistakes are not seen as failures; and where we wish for you to make new mistakes, not the same old ones, for this is where you start learning, start experimenting, start innovating, start pushing the boundaries, start building great products.

I say, you have a strain of folly running in you if you don’t have the fear of making mistakes. What say you?