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Hey Peter, don't be so harsh on yourself. A failure is when you end up working for the bank to pay back the loan or when you end up losing it all, not selling it for what you put in.

The time you spent you spent both building something and learning a lot, that's worth more than several years of education, you are now better prepared, smarter and wiser and I'm sure that your next venture stands a much larger chance of significant success because of all this.

Trust me, nobody that ever 'scored' scored on their first project unless they got wildly lucky or aimed really low.



It's a business failure. That's all he's saying. He's not calling himself a failure. When we say things like, "oh, that's not really a failure", when we highlight these moral victories, we delude people who are considering starting companies.


Business failure = chapter 11, not selling it for a less than spectacular price.


No, Jacques. Re-read his comment. If I buy CSCO at 20 and sell it at 15, it isn't a decent investment just because I was able to offload it.


How would you label cuil?


I don't know, I didn't follow cuil that closely. My understanding is they took significant VC. So their team probably got paid close to market salary. So, if they returned all the capital to investors, they "didn't fail", and if they didn't return capital, they did.


Yes, in personal terms I'm very happy I did it. Learnt heaps and had a lot of fun. And got my name in the NYT and WSJ :)

But as a startup, it failed :)




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