
Peter Thiel on Failure - InfinityX0
In responding to the question &quot;How important is failure in business?&quot;.<p>&quot;I think failure is massively overrated. Most businesses fail for more than one reason. So when a business fails, you often don&#x27;t learn anything at all because the failure was overdetermined. You will think it failed for reason 1, but it failed for reasons 2 through 5. And so the next business you start will fail for reason 2, and then for 3 and so on.&quot;<p>-Peter Thiel on Tim Ferris podcast (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fourhourworkweek.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;09&#x2F;peter-thiel&#x2F;), grabbed from his recent book, Tools of Titans<p>Definition of overdetermined: &quot;To determine, account for, or cause something in more than one way or with more conditions than are necessary.&quot;
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onion2k
In well-funded or established businesses that's entirely right, but for seed-
funded and bootstrapped businesses I'm not sure Thiel is right. If you've only
got a few months money in the bank you don't get to make mistakes 2 through 5
because mistake 1 is enough to shut down the company. That's one of the
reasons why seed funding raises have been going up. When I started my business
(which failed due to a single very obvious mistake[1]) a typical seed round
was $100k. Now it's upwards of $250k. That extra money gives you room to make
more than one bad call.

[1] We spent so long making the product "perfect" we ran out of money before
we had any customers.

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dbg31415
* Failure: The Secret to Success - A Honda Documentary - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOVig5H7UbM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOVig5H7UbM)

