Performative Failure

Fetishization of Performative Failure Creates a Phobia of Actual Failure

This is a weekly newsletter about the art and science of building and investing in tech companies. To receive Investing 101 in your inbox each week, subscribe here:

---

I'm a day late on hitting publish and probably a week late on sleep. You would think that by the fourth kid we would have figured it out, but turns out they're all difficult in their own unique way. They find unique ways to be upset, to not sleep, to have unknowable preferences. Their own magic little bundle of things to unpack.

Because of the aforementioned lack of sleep, I'm also back with a brief one this week. Stick with me on this whole blog writing thing. Once we get this kid on some semblance of a sleep schedule I'll be back with some higher quality writing. I promise I've got a lot of ideas I'm excited about:

• Building a Product-Led Venture Fund: I've written several times before about how venture funds will, increasingly, have to justify their existence and answer the question, "why should founders hire your money?" Crafting a particular value prop or "product" is more important than ever.

• Solution Science Fiction: I wrote recently about about the need for more solution science fiction. I've been collecting examples of this exact kind of genre where people are using boundless imagination to unpack scenarios and solutions that could actually happen, and I want to review them.

• War on Ambition: The Death of Seriousness: I've loved comments from founders like Palmer Luckey and Chris Power on a bygone era when people could actually build with reckless abandon and have unfettered ambition, and how the seriousness that accompanied that style of building has largely been strangled. I've collected a few interesting anecdotes about how exactly we can bring that back.

• Stop Calling Your Firm a Fund: I've written a bunch about capital agglomerators, and just recently touched on how firms like General Catalyst are referring to themselves as a "global investment company." In my opinion, more capital agglomerators would do well to stop framing their companies as "funds" and focus, instead, on what they're trying to accomplish.

• Curating The Curators: A little over a year ago I wrote a piece called King-Making vs. Taste-Making and I've wanted to follow it up. I'm convinced that curation is becoming the leading driver in taste. And we've done very little to formulate who is curating our tastes, perspectives, and opinions. And it could be a lot more dangerous than we think.

• NIMBY Venture Capitalism: Publicly, venture capitalists will always talk their own book and business. But privately, a lot of people are coming around to the idea that raising venture is not actually as universally appropriate as its loudest champions would insist. I've touched on it barely, but there's a lot to unpack here.

I'm genuinely excited to unpack these topics so I can figure out what I think about them. But for now, all I have to offer is one thought that came in response to an old TED Talk I listened to while half falling asleep trying to convince my man Ace to allow himself to be tricked into believing a bottle is a boob.

The Fetishization of Performative Failure

There is a quote that most people, particularly National Treasure fans, will be familiar with. The idea comes from Thomas Edison when responding to a colleague who became discouraged after their experiments had failed to "find out anything" about making a lightbulb. Edison's response?

"I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work!”

There is a myriad of literature, both authentic and of the hustle variety, that sing the song of failure's feedback loops. And rightfully so. Any parent of any child knows the criticality of not being undone by failure.

My boys are not particularly athletic (which is unsurprising to anyone who knows me). But for the health benefits, I continue to encourage them in trying out soccer, basketball, baseball, the works.

As any kid is want to do, when my kids miss a pitch or drop a ball, their immediate inclination is to throw down their bat in frustration and stomp away. And we have the exact same conversations.

Me: How many times do you have to do this before you're good?
Them: Millions
Me: Have you done it millions of times?
Them: No.
Me: Then you just have to keep doing it.

Failure is an important and unavoidable part of learning.

But just like hustle is good and hustle porn is bad, failure is good but the fetishization of failure can be dangerous. Particularly when the failure is performative.

What I mean by performative failure is summed up by the idea that "nothing ventured, nothing gained." Another word for ventured could be risked. And we have a plethora of people who are more interested in playing founder or investor or advisor or "thought leader" in a mostly aesthetic capacity than we do people who are actually putting things on the line.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of people are legitimately risking it all to build the future and my hat is off to them. But there are plenty who are playing the game for the show over the glory, risk and all.

My partner, Will Robbins, has a great question every time we evaluate a deal. "What % of your personal net worth would you invest in this company?" Its the quintessential mechanism for measuring skin in the game.

Our Relationship With Shame

What got me thinking about this? In my half-asleep stupor, I stumbled on a video clip of a TED Talk from March 2012 by Brené Brown called Listening to shame. In the clip, she had a definition that stuck with me and led me to seek out the full talk to listen to it.

"The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is "I am bad." Guilt is "I did something bad." How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, "I'm sorry. I made a mistake?" How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake."

This idea of what Brown describes as an "unspoken epidemic" of shame is what got me thinking about performative failure. The reason so many people are more interested in pretending to fail than actually failing is because they're afraid of the shame they may feel if they actually try and actually fail. They know they would struggle to say “I failed” and, instead, would become obsessed with the idea that “I am a failure.”

That same idea that applies to founders, investors, writers, or anyone striving also came to me in my exploration of different approaches to parenting. Carol Dweck has a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and it lays out the ideas about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.

One example of this in my own life is trying not to say to my son, when he brings home good grades, "wow Dax, you're so smart." Because you're creating a fixed mindset. At this moment I'm telling Dax that he is currently smart. And too often, the fear of losing that status of "smart" creates an intense aversion to risk taking for fear of losing that status.

The same is true of the Stanford GSB grad who worked at McKinsey and Uber before business school, and has been a PM at Ramp for the last 3 years. They may very well have a fixed mindset of themselves as "successful." And any risk taking could result in a loss of that status.

Many people don't have the emotional prowess to distinguish between professional failure and personal failure. Taking a risk is unthinkable for fear of losing that status. But the reality is that just because "I failed" doesn't mean "I'm a failure." But instead of developing a healthy relationship with failure and establishing a growth mindset, most people prefer examples of "performative failure" where they can learn within safe constructs that won't brand them as "failures."

They can work on a side hustle and limp it into an acqui-hire, maybe without ever quitting their job. They can make “angel investments” out of someone else’s “angel fund” without ever risking their own money. They can blog about other people’s failures, without ever making their own. Classic “man in the arena” aversion.

Therefore, What?

My takeaway from this thought is that I need to put more skin in the game. I need to be more willing to fail. Actually fail. And I need to know that when I fail, it doesn't speak to my self-worth. Because, importantly, my self-worth is not dictated by any professional endeavor. As David O. McKay said: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” My success is determined by my own character, my relationship with my wife, my relationship with my children, and my relationship with the people around me. Professional success, in fact, doesn't factor into my self-worth at all. Work doesn’t dictate who you are, its simply a place where you frequently demonstrate who you are. For better or worse.

And across the board, all of us would do well to better calculate the risks we want to take. I write all the time about a phenomenal essay called Choose Good Quests. We should choose which failures we're willing to risk because of the value of the thing we're attempting to pursue. The worthiness of our pursuits make the glory of our failures worth it. To fail in pursuit of cheapness can never result in glorious failure. But to fail in pursuit of the exceptional, the world-shaping, or the divine will yield failures worthy of our eternal potential.

Choose your failures wisely.

---

Thanks for reading! Subscribe here to receive Investing 101 in your inbox each week: