David Rosenthal: recommendation

Transcript context

…It reminds me of a great quote. Bo Lu, the CEO of FutureAdvisor, spoke at one of the first startup weekends that I organized a decade ago or something. I remember him saying, “The way to succeed is to just never admit failure.” As long as you don’t shut down, you haven’t lost. That’s not fully truly. That’s a good way that you can have a small business that doesn’t grow at all and just keep going but I think what you’re saying is if what you’re looking to do is build something big and impactful, as long as you don’t give up and build in the direction of what could catch, it’s unlikely that you will do that for your entire life, and to have something that never works. Just keep trying. I think there’s two versions of giving up or failing. One version of it is what we are doing is not working, we have failed at that, we are going to give up doing that, that’s great. When that’s clearly the case, you should do that and do that as soon as possible. But don’t do the other version of giving up which is saying, “…and thus we are going to call game over and shut down the company and go get jobs somewhere. ” As long as you still have the desire and the resources to keep going, keep going. There’s tremendous value in keeping a team together. This is something, I think that we realize at Pioneer Square Labs, the 25 of us, that all sort of systematically build companies over and over and over again is after you fail on a few things together—or maybe even succeed on a few things together—you know in your small group who’s good at what, you have norms and communication patterns and operations around how you work together, and you get way more efficient at building together. If something didn’t work, keeping the team together and keeping your processes intact and keeping your knowledge of what each other’s competencies are is hugely valuable. I think for anyone considering a pivot, it’s almost like, “Yeah, you bring some baggage when you pivot but you bring far more value from being a team that knows how to work together.”…

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