German entrepreneurs celebrating their mistakes | Hacker News Reader

German entrepreneurs celebrating their mistakes

bbc.co.uk

58 pointsbogle30 comments

Yet I think that while we europeans can learn a great deal of lessons from US entrepreneurs, the "failing is ok" is one of the wrong ones, together with the extreme optimism. In Europe there is a tradition of small businesses that succeeded because of wise moves and organic slow growing. Also if failing becomes less of a problem I've the feeling that many startups may start with ideas that are ways too risky. For sure less optimism and being failure-adverse will make us having less unicorns than the United States. However if you think it in different terms, this will also lead to having less ruined companies and bad moments for the people working there, because for every unicorn there are a huge number of companies failing, and it is not fun when it happens. After all the need for unicorns is because of investors, while people can be ok with small or medium sized companies that make them a good few million dollars to have happy lives.

The EU needs all of the above. I value its capacity for producing sane sustainable companies. But it also needs a healthy dose of the SV ethos. Yeah, that ethos is nuts, high risk and high reward, can chew people up. But it also produces rapid innovative change, rewrites the rules, and produces incredible cultural/intellectual/financial wealth. Europe needs its own version of this, or it will be perpetually playing by American/SV rules. And in a few years, Chinese rules.

Do you think Chinese companies work under SV rules?

There's a new batch of SVish companies coming from China. SVish in the sense that they move fast, spend large amounts of investor money, worry about profitability/sustainability/legality later, and leverage unproven technologies and business models. So in that sense, I think so yes.

In the sense that some Chinese VCs are more motivated by the Communist party's strategic concerns than by profits or idealism, and likewise for some of the resulting startups, in that sense the answer is no.

Thanks for the reply. I know very little about Chinese business practices in general.

You don't need innovation or much risk for clone market strategies (copy a business model from an existing market to a new one). That's what most "innovative" companies in the EU do, and even "artists". It's really disgusting.

They look at SV and copy what works, the societies are still similar enough to extrapolate the demand. Those companies only need a lot of cash to come up with a full featured product right from the start.

Failing is certainly okay.

You can't achieve anything in life without trying. Or I guess you walked straight away after being born. Never tried anything that wasn't already proven.

What a sad way to look at life. No risk, no reward. Unless I guess your "reward" is a life of boredom and monotony.

The fun is in the doing and learning new things. That's why this type of meeting is necessary and helpful for most people that want to start their own business. Helping avoid common (and uncommon) mistakes.

Failing can certainly be okay, but you seem to be looking at it as only failing yourself. When your business fails, there are others who are affected as well. Employees who need paychecks, customers who relied on your goods or services, competitors who you "disrupted" who somehow have to compete with an irrational company.

Agreed, so never try anything because it might not work out.

If competitors fail because of this mythical irrational attempt at a company, that's on them.

As for employees, don't take a job at any company, because it might fail.

My first job out of college was at Arthur Andersen. Had roughly 58,000 employees at the time. A few partners and the government took care of that.

Everything in life is a risk, if you want to live in a padded room that's fine, but some of us know the sun will still come up tomorrow. The exciting part is making that tomorrow something of your choosing.

I'm more terrified of my gravestone saying "He showed up to work then retired on time. Well done." than "He tried his ass off and failed all the way to the finish line."

Germans have a very different risk-reward preference to Americans.

A majority of the American electorate seem to tolerate at-will employment, the barest minimum of a welfare state and millions of people without healthcare. That set of values is probably part of the reason why America has such a high GDP per capita, but it's not objectively correct.

German companies do take risks and do innovate, but they rarely if ever bet the entire company on a 10x or bust play. German workers enjoy very good statutory rights, but they also have a relationship of mutual trust with employers, aided by a strong and progressive trade union movement. By and large, German workers would rather take a pay cut than see a round of layoffs.

Don't straw-man that position just because you disagree with it. Don't act like the Germans are terrible cowards because they value stability and security. Their society has made an entirely rational and reasonable set of choices about the rights of workers and the responsibilities of employers.

Being Ok with failure and being risk-happy are two different things.

Being risk-happy doesn't mean you're okay with failure either.

Failing isn't becoming "not a problem", rather when you fail you recognize it as a chance to learn why you failed and how to make better next time, rather than trying not to fail ever.

Failure is a real possibility when you try do something difficult and /or game changing. Failure isn't good but it's ok unless you want to be forever mediocre.

Every one of those businesses "fail" at something every single day. At best, they make sub-optimal decisions which is still failure. Failure doesn't mean catastrophic failure and it also doesn't mean taking unnecessary risk.

Everyone just needs to know and understand the repercussions before signing up at a start-up.

But without risks, there is no progress. It's messy but necessary for innovation.

> at the core of a worldwide movement - with an unprintable name that loosely correlates with "Failure Nights"

The name is FuckUp Nights if anybody is wondering

I prefer the term "embrace"... turning it into "celebration" risks making failure the goal. It is absolutely critical that people be allowed to fail. If people can't fail they won't take risk, and risk is where real innovation happens. But we should be careful not to turn failure into the new success.

Respect people who took a chance and failed. Learn from them. Embrace them. But I'd stop short at celebrating them. Save the celebration for next time (or 5th time) when you finally succeed and accomplish something amazing.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. I wish I knew more earlier about possible startup failure modes. Sadly only great successes are well communicated. Nobody writes about failure when partner got cold feet or development effort was greatly underestimated or product/market fit was miserable without room for pivoting.

This was talked about on Hacker News yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16561764

And the book:

How to Destroy a Tech Startup in 3 Easy Steps

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...

Ben Horowitz wrote a decent book about the endless difficulties of start-ups and business in general [1]. It's not so much strictly failure-learn focused (eg learning from the results of a failed start-up), as it is challenge-overcome focused (eg working your way through the never ending beating that is doing a start-up).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0...

During SXSW 2016, The Irish (specifically IDA Ireland) held an Irish Wake for Dead Startups. It was to hear people talk about failure and the lessons learned thereby.

https://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/03/15/irish-startup-wake...

I thought it was a clever idea as well. Some of the Tech Ireland things can be hit and miss but I thought it was good.

As Canadian who spends a fair amount of time in Germany, I've always found German bankruptcy laws somewhat horrific. Although to be fair the idiots I've known that went bankrupt personally in Canada wouldn't have been able to do the same things in Germany they did in Canada.

Can you give an example of what you find horrific?

Yes, Fuck Up Nights are not specific to Berlin or Germany, are they?

Their website claims that they're in 80 countries. Iirc it started in Mexico.

I am not german but I have observed a general trend with british media/BBC is they amplify anything that devalues germany/germans in general, not sure why.

We've done them before in Amsterdam.

German startups are like American beer.

Flat as hell, mostly tasteless, and bound to leave you feeling like you did something really, really wrong last night?

Since when has the BBC become squeamish about "unprintable" (which itself is a strange choice of word on the web, by a non-print publisher like the BBC no less) words like 'fuck'?

It's not like the haven't been using it before: https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=fuck

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