How many people were employed at ClusterHQ? Honestly I never even heard of the company but I had heard of some of the open source projects. Maybe I'm just out of the loop.
Also any information as to lessons learned, etc? Basically why it failed? Looking at the marketing material I didn't see anything really remarkable about it (nothing that stood out as a "oh this is why I would give them money") so I'm curious.
> I’ve been part of big successes as well as failures. While the former are more pleasurable, the latter must be relished as a valuable part of life, especially in Silicon Valley.
Relished? I never really understood the Silicon Valley "failing is awesome!" mentality. Failure is failure. It's not awesome. Why would you relish it? Take the lessoned learned for sure but you likely just lost several people's money and you lost your employees their jobs, what is there to take enjoyment from? Seems a little sadistic and a tad lacking in empathy for others involved.
> Failure is failure. It's not awesome. Why would you relish it?
You're beating on a straw man. Nobody (very few people?) thinks the failure itself is good in and of itself. The mentality is to observe that even if a business endeavour ends in financial failure, that outcome is just one effect of a long process that had many effects, and that many of the other effects of the process were highly beneficial.
Sure, some people are out of a job, and some investment money has been lost - these are bad things, and nobody is claiming otherwise. On the other hand, many people have been gainfully employed for some time, and have gained a great deal of professional experience. That value has not been lost. Open source software has been created, and continues to be useful. That value has not been lost. Investors have lost money on this bet, but if they distributed their risk over many bets, they are probably going to come out ahead of where they would be if they made no bets whatsoever. Many people have learned some lessons about why a business may fail to be financially successful, and can use that knowledge to build financially successful businesses in the future. In sum: much value has been created which would not exist if this business had not been attempted, even if it ended in financial failure.
I think the critical idea is separating out the idea of the business failure and a moral failure on the part of those involved.
Businesses fail, and that's often sad. They even fail when you do everything right. It's just not shameful to have your business fail, nor in itself a mark on the character of those involved.
How so? If you're stating that you're going to greatly enjoy your failure, how is that not making failure seem good? Can you greatly enjoy something that you don't consider awesome (greatly being the keyword)?
Seems like we could split hairs over this in a variety of different ways. On the other hand the rest of your post discusses the value created out of a failed company which wasn't related to the context of my post.
I think we're going to be arguing in straw man circles :)
> if they distributed their risk over many bets, they are probably going to come out ahead of where they would be if they made no bets whatsoever
Not necessarily true, actually. The best investors come out ahead. The majority of them near break even or lose money on a fund. At least this is what I've always found unless you have a source I could take a look at?
> On the other hand the rest of your post discusses the value created out of a failed company which wasn't related to the context of my post.
"not relevant"? The entire point of my response was to point out that the fundamental flaw in your argument is that you are ignoring the wider effects of the business process, while the "failure is success" mentality is all about taking into consideration those same wider effects.
> If you're stating that you're going to greatly enjoy your failure, how is that not making failure seem good? Can you greatly enjoy something that you don't consider awesome.
You don't enjoy the failure, but you can still enjoy the process that happens to lead to the failure, and the net outcome can still be positive. Once again: the mentality you're attempting to criticise is all about accounting for the entire process and all of its outcomes, and not narrow-mindedly focusing on just the financial outcome for the business.
> I think we're going to be arguing in straw man circles
If you continue to insist on equivocating between financial failure of the business (an individual outcome) and the holistic outcome of the entire process, yes. Well, I won't bother to continue responding, but that's beside the point.
> If you're stating that you're going to greatly enjoy your failure
'Relish' in this context doesn't mean 'greatly enjoy', as in entertainment. It means simply 'to significantly value', as in valuing the learning opportunity, but not necessarily the event itself.
Er, not trying to be pedantic but I can't find this definition anywhere. Is that an informal use? I only see references to the condiment or similar to 'greatly enjoy'.
Might be one of those cases where using more specific wording would have helped the blog entry.
The article is talking about relishing the richness of life's experience, not some sort of Machiavellian cackling while you watch people lose their jobs. The failures are simply to be valued as learning experiences that are part of life. That particular phrase is preceded in the same sentence with another phrase saying that the failures basically aren't pleasureable.
Read the paragraph as a whole, and don't just fish out one phrase and take it out of context.
I read the whole thing. Taking it at face value I don't see what you're talking about in it at all. Maybe he meant it in the way you're saying? Maybe he didn't? It's usually best to speak in literals on the internet and not hope to someone to fish out implications.
Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and inventor of the Z-buffer, has a great take on mistakes and failure in his book Creativity, Inc. Here's a pretty decent summary:
> Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation.
Celebrating failure and being failure averse have nothing to do with each other other than celebrating failure means you're probably not failure averse (but I would argue you lack empathy for the people you just lost money for and for the people you just lost jobs for).
"Essentially, we're going to fail. It happens. Might as well get it out of the way.
Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation."
That's a very interesting philosophy ... I wonder how that idea, in general, relates to clusters ?
I've seen organizations pour lots of time and resources and brain power into chasing nines on their uptime and they all have outages. And those outages are particularly painful due to the complexity that had to be added - complexity that sometimes grows non-linear in relation to the "nines gained".
I've always leaned towards building dumb things that failed simply. They're going to fail anyway ...
I read the whole book, let me put Catmull's quotes in context. They're not really generalized startup/life advice; Creativity Inc. is targeted toward people who are already in management and want to improve their department's output.
While the root principle that failure is a mile marker, not a road block, on the path to innovation can be extracted, Catmull's book itself is not really about that topic. Rather, it's about how Pixar came to be (recounting major events in company history up to publication, including the spinoff from LucasArts and the death of Steve Jobs), the principles that power Pixar's culture, and how Pixar seeks to instill those principles in its employees.
In context, I feel that Catmull is specifically addressing two points when he discusses failure. First, dealing with failure within the ranks of your workforce and second, imbuing upon the workforce a confidence that allows them to be mutually critical without getting hostile.
Catmull is a engineer first and foremost, that's what needs to be understood going in. He is taking an engineering approach and applying it to management. IMO, Pixar is an excellent example of what happens when one does that.
The first point about not firing people over mistakes or bugs is something that engineers know well, but non-technical people may not understand. A bug, a hole, a mistake, a vulnerability, a typo (like the one that almost deleted Toy Story 2 and could've destroyed Pixar if not for an accidental backup on the home computer of a telecommuting employee) is not a valid firing offense. You need to hire smart people and give them room. That includes acknowledging their humanity, and that the best of us are still going to make simple mistakes sometimes, just because we're human. Even elite runners trip and fall sometimes; practice doesn't make perfect but it makes very good.
Dismissing good talent based on the types of simple mistakes that are essentially random events is first, very wasteful of both monetary and talent resources, and second, antithetical to a culture that teaches that mistakes, experimentation, learning, and exploration are not only OK, but necessary parts of doing things that are worthwhile.
The second point is more about the employees and developing a culture where they can be comfortable that their image and reputation is not impugned when a colleague expresses his or her honest beliefs about their work product, and vice versa. This is another thing that engineers really value and understand well, but which causes a lot of non-technical people to worry endlessly.
Catmull recounts how many people need time to adjust to a culture of free, open, and fair criticism (which makes sense, as many corporate ranks are terrorized by glancing, unstable egomaniacs scattered throughout the ladder) and how Pixar assists them in developing the mutual understanding, trust, and respect that allows them to provide true and honest feedback to one another without becoming bitter. That is, "failure" in one task is a lesson to be learned from, not a fault to be feared, and such "failures" are welcome at Pixar because they understand it is an intrinsic element of exploration and development. Pixar's task is to help its employees internalize these values, so that such open criticism can refine their output into the exceptional pieces of art that they're known for producing.
Pixar, via Catmull, is a wonderful example of what happens when a smart, fair, and directly involved leader is allowed to control something he knows well. That's something that happens all too rarely. We'd have many more Pixars if we could get more Catmull-esque people in positions where they could override the drones who go around flashing their MBAs.
Having a culture where failure is okay is different from having a culture where failure is valued. Like the parent commenter said, if failure means you look back at what happened, learn some lessons, do better next time, then that's fine, you've gotten value out of failure. If you say "Hey, I got a failure out of the way," you're playing slots and falling victim to the gambler's fallacy.
> Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.
> Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).
David Anderson (kanban) once observed that if your estimates are accurate then they should be wrong about half the time (and half of those overestimated).
The pressure to make them into promises instead of estimates is, I think, a form of failure aversion, one that Almost everyone deals with and one that causes a lot of unnecessary drama.
I don't remember whose quote this is, but the old line about how if you aren't failing from time to time it means you aren't trying hard enough. Your reach can't exceed your grasp if you don't reach at all.
However its easy to fail from sheer stupidity as well. Failure is a trapping of success, not an indicator.
1) It means you tried. Most people don't even get that far because they're too busy being terrified of failure
2) It means a hypotheses has been vetted and deemed not correct/successful, so something was learned.
3) I'm sure some of it is just trying to put a brave face on a shitty situation. If you try something, fail and then jump off a bridge because you're so donwn on yourself over it I'd say that's the wrong approach. No one likes failure, but having a more positive mindset about it is healthier than the alternative.
> I'm sure some of it is just trying to put a brave face on a shitty situation. If you try something, fail and then jump off a bridge because you're so donwn on yourself over it I'd say that's the wrong approach. No one likes failure, but having a more positive mindset about it is healthier than the alternative.
There is a difference between having a positive mindset and looking at something that negatively affected a lot of people as a positive. I don't think those two have to be the same at all.
I would love to hear some feedback from the employees there, however :)
It kind of reeks of entitlement to me. You would never see someone who is barely scraping by at a blue-collar job make a post celebrating getting laid off.
Full-fledged failure is genuinely unpleasant, and Silicon Valley plays deceptive word games to hide this. Most of what's cheerfully dubbed "failure" should be called "short-lived experiments that didn't work out."
Those doodles-gone-wrong can be shrugged off. We can count rapid-cycle launch goofs in that category, because there's an easy chance to come to market a couple months later with something better. We can even include small-scale corporate wipe-outs, too, as long as it's mostly VC money that got squandered and the investors expect some duds in their portfolio. ("Deal me another hand, mister!")
If it's five years of your life that collapses into dust, that's not fun at all. If it's a colossal product failure that damns your reputation (or your customers' lives) for keeps, that's pretty grim, too. I don't mean to get morose about it, but the key to longevity in any field involves making sure that your supposed failures actually are pretty transient and superficial.
Not saying "failure is awesome! this is my favorite!" but saying "Ive learned something from this failure and walked away a better person from it." Also, you need low points to make high points better. if high points are your baseline, you never feel higher than average, and low points become abyssmally low. Knowing that "hey, sometimes shit happens" makes happy moments happier.
And I guarantee you that SpaceX wants to learn failure points on early Falcon 9 landings rather than when their interplanetary ships land on mars with people on them.
Science heavily leans towards proving what we think is right, while little goes towards proving something is wrong. Which means you need every point of failure to help prove the bounds of a model.
If failure is used as a learning aid, then failure is great. If you don't learn from your failures and just keep repeating the exact same mistake, then yes, it is nothing to celebrate.
> Also any information as to lessons learned, etc? Basically why it failed? Looking at the marketing material I didn't see anything really remarkable about it (nothing that stood out as a "oh this is why I would give them money") so I'm curious.
My personal take on this from what I've red in the post (which is kinda harsh).
[First, containerization (read: Docker) is in its infancy. It's only 3 years old. Let's assume it's immature and not well understood.]
It seems from the post that ClusterHQ is about doing stateful containers + The company was born in 2014. Stateless containers are still a challenging and new topic as of now. Stateful containers are purely theoretical as of right now.
They had => No product. No market. No business model. Tech is not ready. Usages ain't defined. It couldn't go well.
They don't seem to have products or sale something? Were they an open source company by any chance? (I couldn't tell, never heard of them, site is shutting down so too late).
Why not when it's someone else's money that is gone, and even better, your continued success is basically guaranteed since you have a network now that you can call on to join as an "advisor" or that can get you another pile of money to burn on a startup? Who wouldn't relish a position in their career with very few real consequences?
Also any information as to lessons learned, etc? Basically why it failed? Looking at the marketing material I didn't see anything really remarkable about it (nothing that stood out as a "oh this is why I would give them money") so I'm curious.
> I’ve been part of big successes as well as failures. While the former are more pleasurable, the latter must be relished as a valuable part of life, especially in Silicon Valley.
Relished? I never really understood the Silicon Valley "failing is awesome!" mentality. Failure is failure. It's not awesome. Why would you relish it? Take the lessoned learned for sure but you likely just lost several people's money and you lost your employees their jobs, what is there to take enjoyment from? Seems a little sadistic and a tad lacking in empathy for others involved.
But maybe that's just me.