Failure is not an option. It’s a requirement.

I just found this video on WorkHappy.net and I really liked it:

I like the way everyone in the video talks about failure. I think that every crappy company must fail in order to succeed. The fact is that if you are in a startup, there is about a 99.999% chance that what you are doing now isn’t what you will be doing in a year. In fact, for your sake, I hope it isn’t. That’s not to say that I think your entire business will fail, but some aspect of it will fail and you will, you should emerge from that knowing a lot more about how to become a good company than you knew before you failed.

Fail fast but not often. Understand that you will have to reinvent yourselves a couple of times before you get it right. If you have this mindset, you’ll be a lot more careful about spending your money. Trust me that you are going to fail and make that happen as fast as possible and with as little cash out the door as possible so that you can get on to making your crappy company a good one.