This past week, San Antonio held its first StartUp Week. This week long event brought together start up leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs to share helpful insight, network, and advice! Our VentureLab team attended many of the events. One of those events was the Founder Fireside Chats: Learning From Mistakes, Pivots, and Failures. At this event, we got to hear from four start up leaders who not only faced their fear of failure, but learned from it!
Here are the stories and advice about failure that they shared with us!
Magaly Chocano
CEO, Sweb Development
The love and pride Magaly has for her company is not only obvious, but infectious. She is very involved in all developments and operations at Sweb. Due to this, Magaly’s entrepreneurial process is extremely personal. She explains that, while this is a source of pride, the prospect of failing is extremely personal too. This is because she faces the issue of becoming too attached to her product. She has found that this kind of attachment can prevent a failure to be a source of learning, and thus makes the idea of failing even scarier.
So how does she overcome this obstacle? In the face of failure, Magaly trusts her gut. Because she is so attached to the mission of her company, she trusts herself to know when something isn’t helping fulfil it or make it better. This gives her the confidence to make the right decision, and be ok when things don’t go as planned. She also has an amazing team that is super honest and transparent. This means that they help and advise each other to make the best decisions possible. And finally, she and her team focus on the growth the company as a whole, rather than the growth of individual products. This is key to learning from failure. Rather than giving up, Magaly and her team simply ask “If we can build this, we can do something else”. They don’t give up, they pivot. This means that she and her team take a moment to pause, and rather than moving on or giving up, they simply redirect the product or situation to a more successful direction. Doing so removes the scariness of failure, and often leads to unseen creative solutions.
What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs: Keep moving forward! Some things will be good, some will be bad. The key is stick to your goal, and find ways to constantly pursue it.
Lorenzo Gomez
CEO, Geekdom
One thing that is obvious about Lorenzo is that he is a huge team player! He knows first hand that when you start your own company there are red flags and opportunities for failure everywhere. It’s scary, and can be overwhelming. He explains that you and your team will not only face these together, but set the tone for how your company responds to these issues. You need to have a great team that is honest, supportive, and trustworthy. Lorenzo does this is by selecting one person to always be completely honest with him. It may seem odd, but having someone tell you “no one will buy that” can be extremely helpful. This is because it allows you to have time to work out the bugs of your product in a low risk environment. It is with the help of his honest team that Lorenzo finds the first initial three qualities he wants in his product. From this, they work as a team to modify and improve.
Teamwork is key! The work you and your teammate put in will be apparent in the product you make. For Lorenzo, the team’s successes and failures are the company’s successes and failures. He believes a team’s greatest two failures are when team members find themselves not feeling valued as a team member, or inspired by the team’s leadership. These failures may not be apparent at first. Lorenzo explains, that even if a company has accomplished all of its set short term goals, not having a solid team will prevent long term success. As a team member and leader, it is important to acknowledge the passion, talent, and hard work expressed by each of your teammates! That is what makes and keeps a company successful.
What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs: Be passionate about your project! You will be spending so much time working on it with your team. This can’t just be a hobby.
Jason Straughan
CEO/Software Engineer, Gork Interactive, LLC
Being honest with yourself and your team, that is the core of Jason entrepreneurial philosophy. Working as an engineer and now CEO, Jason has found that skills can be taught. For example, you can work with team members to learn a new program, or technique. However, being a good person, and fit for a team simply must be. You can’t ask your team members to change who they are for the sake of the team. He finds that you must be proactive when putting together a team. It is important to have teammates that work well together. That they are honest with each other, and most of all, trust each other.
Jason finds that brutal honesty is the foundation of success. More importantly, as an entrepreneur, you have to be brutally honest with yourself. He explains that everything you plan will not be actualize, or become “the dream”. You will face many obstacles. These obstacles will shape you and change your product. You need your self-honestly to be aware of how awesome, or poorly you are doing. Having this honestly will allow you to pivot, make changes, regroup, and continue pursuing your goal.
What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs: Have a mentor, and listen to them! But don’t forget to mainly trust yourself. At the end of the day, you are the one most acquainted with your product. Pay attention to that one thing your mentor said to you that you just can’t shake. That is the piece of advice that contains the key to making your business better.
Melissa Unsell
Vice President and Founding Member, Elumicor
As a former biology major, Melissa beautifully uses the scientific method to generate business success, and address startup failures. She and her team host weekly experiments to help pinpoint what their customers want, and to focus on how their product is being used. She believes that time should not be spent on assumptions. To avoid failure, you must focus on what your customers need, not what you think they want.
How does a young entrepreneur do this? As Melissa explains, you have to look at what your customers are doing, and understand what is happening when they use the product. As she puts it,“you can have one million website hits, but so what -- you must look into what is really happening there”. This means you must not only collect data about your customer, but understand what that data is telling. This is how she and her team use the scientific method. They propose a hypothesis, test their hypothesis through organized research, collect the data, and then learn to understand exactly what that data means. Melissa acknowledges that this may seem very difficult. However, it is extremely helpful. She notes, by doing so, you are not only learning how you failed, but ways to avoid failure. You are making a pathway to your own success! You can use this pathway to learn from mistakes later on, and identify the direction that your company is going in. It gives you more control of your entrepreneurial idea, and the ability to make quick decisions to make it better!
What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs: The more you can fail, the more you learn! Look at failure as an opportunity to get better. And, measure! It’s so important!
