I failed but emerged stronger from the experience  

Driven by economic changes wrought by the pandemic, entrepreneurship has boomed across the world’s major economies in the past couple of years. 

There has been a cultural shift, too: society now worships at the altar of entrepreneurship — at least judging from news websites, case studies and social media, which are awash with success stories and hashtags that romanticize the life of the founder. The creators of multi-billion-dollar companies, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the late Steve Jobs, have become the rockstars of the business world. 

Society has a success fetish. But rarely does the harsh reality of being a founder receive enough attention: the setbacks, problems, disappointments — and the inevitable failures. While Instagram and TikTok make heroes of risk-taking, the flipside of that — the high failure rate — is still taboo. The danger is that this creates a false impression that being an entrepreneur is easy. It is not. Understandably, few entrepreneurs want to shout about their failed ventures. But I do.  

I wrote my book — How Hard Can It Be. Startup Lessons from Trying (And Failing) To Take Down Facebook — I try to encourage a more honest dialogue about the trials and tribulations of the venture lifestyle. If we talk more openly about failure, we can improve the likelihood of success. Disaster can be a better learning opportunity than achievement.  

Startups cannot invent the future without taking risks. Thomas Edison carried out 9,000 experiments before coming up with a successful version of the light bulb. Henry Ford got nowhere with his first two attempts at auto-making, but he didn’t let that stop him from pioneering the assembly line technique of mass production.  

Companies that are regarded as being the most innovative — Apple, Google and Microsoft — are renowned for having cultures that tolerate failure. They recognize that if invention has negative consequences, no one would ever try anything new. Amazon founder Bezos once characterized failure and invention as “inseparable twins”.  

My own personal experience of failing in the tech industry provides lessons on how to make the most out of losses. What I have learned can help propel you forward in entrepreneurship, whether you’re an upstart looking to displace an industry, or an executive driving change within an established corporation.   

I created my company in 2012 with the aim of taking down social media giant Facebook. I was working in change management consulting at the time, and went into business with a colleague from my firm. Despite Facebook’s popularity, we saw numerous problems. Some of the platform’s inventors had spoken out about its addictive nature. Founding Facebook president Sean Parker described it as “a social-validation feedback loop … you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”. 

As has been well-documented, the endless quest for social validation may be harming our health. A survey of 1,500 young people in the UK found platforms such as Facebook stoked anxiety, depression and poor sleep in children. By exposing people to unrealistic representations of users’ lives, these sites can lead to feelings of social isolation.  

Facebook is also turning people into couch potatoes; I wanted to get them off the sofa and out of their comfort zones. Our idea was to create a platform that encouraged real-world experiences. The mechanism to make that happen was a “challenge”. On our platform, called challengesЯus.com, people would dare their friends to do things, such as running a marathon or learning a new language.  

This tapped into the innate human desire for progress. The network got strong early traction with 3,000 sign-ups soon after launch. But then cracks began to show. The problem was that few people were completing their challenges. It is very easy to say you’ll do something, but eventually people find excuses not to follow through. At first I refused to believe this; I thought the platform was the problem. So we spent months refining the sign-up process and making the platform more user-friendly.  

When that didn’t work, we decided to incentivize people to finish their challenges. We got influencers and celebrities to dare people, in order to boost their brand and engagement. The American polar explorer Eric Larsen, for example, was challenged to trek 750 miles to the South Pole by bicycle in temperatures 20-degrees below zero. He ultimately failed. The strategy had a minor impact on completion rates, but we needed greater traction.  

We decided we had to pivot, from a B2C to a B2B business model. Instead of monetizing user growth through advertising, we started selling the platform to organizations that challenged employees to solve business and HR challenges internally. We signed up major corporations with thousands of staff, including General Electric, Absolut Vodka and UPM-Kymmene Oyj. But this model was hard to scale, because each company wanted us to devise a unique challenge for their workforce. Without recruiting an army of salespeople, this process was too labor intensive for us to manage. We were becoming a consultancy firm.