When You Admit Your Mistakes, You Turn Them Into Success
Today, my CEO acknowledged he had made a mistake & it’s the best thing that has ever happened.
For months, the focus was on our product strategy & direction. Once a bunch of assumptions were made, there wasn’t focus on validating the product. As a result, there was not much traction from investors.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
We have a few customers, we should be fundable.
Live in the Present, Not the Future
The cost to pivot a product that was built on a bunch of assumptions is too great. Especially, when the product was built in 3 years. As a result, you can easily fall into the trap of never wanting to change what you own. The emotional investment you place into your product keeps you from making the hardest decision to make the necessary changes.
At every startup, there is always the pressure of the money question. When is the startup going to be funded? Will the startup be around tomorrow? You can be full of great ideas, but it is always important to stay in the moment and to focus on the work at hand.
It’s easy to make excuses and to blame things outside of your control. It’s hard to admit mistakes and find solutions. Working for so long and not reciving any validation for the work you accomplished is a terrible feeling. It’s easy to sulk and give up.
Once the mistake is acknowledged, the important step is how to respond.
The response that I made was complacency. The team lost a member after we failed to deliver on initial promises. The fact that my CEO is this insane “Mr. Positive” all the time made me focus on playing Mr. Devil’s Advocate. Being complacent made my care for my work suffer and easily sucked the energy out of me. I was uncertain in the success of the company because of the direction it was going towards. I should have found alternative ways to convince the CEO on how to get back on the right track, I failed. As a result, the entire company failed and we all learned from that moment.
It starts with checking your ego at the door and admitting you messed up. The moment my CEO did that, I felt better; the morale and faith were restored in my CEO.
My goal now is to do my best to keep the new focus on our customers. Start with a few, understand the pains and concerns from our customers, and iterate based off that feedback. No longer are we going to assume that our customers want this product or this idea.
I was taught that it’s always important to protect your thoughts and ideas. In the business world, it’s very easy to be swayed by other people’s decisions. You have to be able to push your ideas forward. This is very difficult to do because you generally assume your leader is always right. Finding ways to develop your power of influence will improve your negotiation skills down the road.
Only 25% of startups succeed, 0.1% reaches the billion dollar valuation.
In many ways, growing a startup is like a war. There are many battles that take place to achieve that 25% that is counted as a successful startup. In this case, only a battle was lost. The war is not over. Absolutely, in many parts of life, you will fail. As cliche as this sound, it’s how you respond. Understanding that there are many possibilities to always make the situation better is important.
A few years ago, I had the privilege to attend the 2013 SASE National Conference in Philadelphia. They keynote speaker at that time was a former Marketing officer at Facebook, Chris Pan.
During his presenation, he talked about his time and experience at Facebook. He mentioned that there were posters everywhere that were reminding the employees to push the limits.
Chris shared a story about a Facebook engineer who was coding and accidentally shut down Facebook for a few hours. Was the engineer fired? No, it was an honest mistake. He was trying to push the boundaries of finding a more optimized solution. He was trying to fail harder.
This culture is important for organizations trying to continue to innovate and grow. This same idea should be something you should aspire to: pushing to fail harder.
Something that I take from that keynote, was the idea that you can get lost in the world. There are a lot of stresses and a lot of distractions. At times, you just need to take a step back and breath. It makes everything feel a hella lot better.
Admit your mistakes & keep trying to make mistakes.
