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11th October 2021

Celebrating Failure in Tech’s Golden Age

John Galpin

It’s been an incredible 12-18 months for the tech sector with exponential growth. The UK tech VC investment hit a record high of $15bn in 2020 despite the challenges of the pandemic, which has fast-tracked the uptake of tech in both our personal and professional lives – there’s an app for everything. Its widely debated whether we have or have not entered a golden age of technology, many experts believe it is down to geographical innovation as to which point in the age individual nations are at. There’s no doubt however that technology is remaking the economy, its role during the pandemic is evidence of that.

Then, echoing our love for space in the 60s, there is the advancements of space tech and the space race 2.0 by a handful of billionaires who are looking to democratise space travel - within days of each other Bezos and Branson have both successfully gone into orbit this summer.

It appears that we are innovating and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible again. Like his tech peers, Elon Musk is also determined to buck the trend for zero innovation in space travel. He believes we need to act ‘with extreme urgency’ when it comes to innovating the sector.

While we laud techs 2020/21 success stories and live-stream the low orbit flights, when it comes to the developments in tech there is something else we are witnessing – the joy of failure.

In recent years, there has been a shift in mindset away from the harmful negative connotations of failure to something accepting and even celebratory. That's something worth discussing.

In Western Europe, people tended to find failure difficult to accept and even more so to share or talk about. Whereas in the US it’s a badge of honour - it’s expected to have several failures before you make it – and people are more open about it. The idea of ‘move/fail fast and break things’ (devised by Zuckerberg) recognises that failure is also a part of the journey to success.

What we have witnessed is that 'failure' has been rebranded and repositioned.

The repositioning of failure

"If things are not failing, you are not innovating.
Elon Musk

'Failure' has leagues of followers, fans, and devoted communities online, where people share their successes and failures with an equal sense of pride. Failing is about learning and moving on and then sharing those learnings so everyone can innovate, develop and grow. Space X’s Starship launch failures were live-streamed as the teams tested, learned and iterated as part of the innovation process. Musk understands the need to work at pace to maintain innovation, and that failing faster is better in the long game, better for the entrepreneurs and investors alike. Failure makes us ask, can it work, can it scale?

What’s this shift about?
Changes to the perception of failure:

The heroes of failure - the people who are prepared to fail.
Sharing failure - people who share failure.
‘The mindset leveller’ - if you don't fail you don't learn.

1.The heroes of failure

If we look at some of our biggest tech success stories, we uncover heroes of failure. Tech titans such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are part of this positive shift in attitude to failure. They are on the record discussing the failures that helped them achieve greatness.

But the shift is bigger than just the big players, it’s embraced by the small and big players alike. Where did it start? This openness and sharing mindset is relatively new. In a post-WW2 world shrouded in secrecy, iron curtains and walls, the 90s generation wanted to open barriers and tear down borders in the interest of transparency and growth, which was expedited first by mobile phone technology and then the arrival of the internet.

The advent of social media in the 00s said sharing was good. And so, the heroes of failure were born and given a platform to tackle the negativity aimed at tech geeks and stargazers, who embraced the tech to share the failures and the journeys that allowed them to succeed. In a refreshing change, where once there were coverups, now failure is a TedTalk playlist.

But social isn’t just for the big players to discuss their failures. It’s where the nerds and geeks coalesced, and they brought tech failures to a whole new level – FailArmy has 15+M YouTube subscribers with a dedicated channel to tech fails.

‘When we are developing a new product or service or experimenting in some way,
and it doesn't work, that's okay. That's great failure.’
Jeff Bezos

2.Sharing the journey

Technology itself became the facilitator of failure shares. Sites such as YouTube allowed people to film themselves trying out home developed tech, which invariably leads to smashing, crashing, and blowing stuff up. Importantly, it has allowed communities to build a cultural movement of sharing the good, the bad and the ugly of innovation. The proliferation of new channels from 2005, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tock etc., allowed these communities to reach and build new audiences, launching the ‘follower’ era –a thumbs up for failure.

Social media has created some tech failure stars, such as Simone Giertz who is famous for being the ‘Queen of Shitty Robots’. Giertz has a league of devoted fans and followers, has done TV appearances and has recently done a successful TedTalk about celebrating failure.

Similarly, there is a whole army of YouTubers and other channels following the innovation in the Space industry, with live streams of test flights, launch infrastructure construction and daily general progress updates. People delight in the crashes and burns (unmanned) as much as successful flights.

3.The shift in mindset

The adage, ‘if at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again’, couldn’t be truer in the sense that not everyone gets it right the first time. The difference is that you hear about this more now than ever before, and not in a derisory way, but because people recognise that it is part of the entrepreneurial journey - some ideas fly, others don’t. And there are many reasons why things don’t succeed – timing, being best not first, or not letting perfection be the enemy of progress and so on. For every success story, there are 80% of businesses that we never hear about and that fail in the first year. This is increasingly becoming the natural order of things. But the flip side is that it is better to try something and fail fast rather than continue blindly. The agility of fail-fast innovation, while counter-intuitive sounding, helps people find success. It’s also about knowing when to stop, Sir James Dyson’s ambition of building the next-gen electric car (with £2bn planned investment) bailed after £500 million because it wasn’t going to be ‘commercially viable’. However, from the ashes of his failure has risen advancements in car battery technology.

The combination of the heroes of failure and the openness and transparency of sharing their stories are behind the shift to accepting failure as part of the road to success. Seeing others, both big and small players from industry and back gardens alike, try and fail has opened the door for acceptance.

Conclusion

“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
Bill Gates

The three points discussed come back to one thing, Technology. It’s not failure that has changed, but how we perceive and respond to it which has. It is the normalcy and accepted expectations that a certain number of failures will take place before the eureka moment. The thing about tech is that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And that’s fine.

In 2021, the open attitudes to how we achieved our success, built-in with an expectation of failure is simply refreshing. And when someone such as British-American entrepreneur, Astro Teller, talks about the joy of breaking things to foster an environment where it is safe to fail (X Laboratories (Google)), it helps to take the pressure off someone who is starting out with just an idea. Knowing that there are platforms where you can share and discuss your ideas safely without judgement is a support system for innovation, because if you are afraid to fail, you may not try anything at all. Imagine living in that world. The message here is that it’s better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all–celebrate your triumphs and your failures.

John Galpin is a Co-Founder at Design by Structure.

This article was first published in Top Business Tech.

7th October 2021

From Seed to Unicorn: Brand strategy for the tech startup.

For tech start-ups setting out on their journey to launch a revolutionary new product or service to the market, the first hurdle is to get investors interested enough to stake you in the game. But going from passion project to million-pound start-up isn’t the end goal, nor an indicator of success. In fact, 70% of upstart tech companies will fail at around 20 months after first raising investment [1].

How do you ensure that your newly formed company thrives, gains further investment, and becomes a household name? After all, if you want to reach that coveted unicorn status (£1billion+ valuation), you'll need to scale at speed, excite the investors, stay disruptive, be a category leader, and of course fight off new competition. All done so that you’re able to map your route to becoming profitable or create enough disruption to one day IPO or sell up to the bigger players.

Search Google today for 'branding for startups' and you're hit with a barrage of articles, thought leadership and some questionable insight on the right approach for creating a brand for your new venture.

A lot of this advice is centred around getting out into the world quickly. Select a name, throw a logo together, build a website and get on social media. And that could work, especially if you have a killer product that can attract and excite an audience. Haste may also show your commitment to your investors as you launch your minimum viable product (MVP) out into the world. However, a speedy approach may cause more harm than good as you find that further down the road you must make obvious U-turns, pivots, or realise that people have little resonance with you as a company because of a distinct lack of consistency.

While branding may not be up there on your list of priorities – when you have a million different workstreams to contend with – you should reconsider prioritising it.

Your brand and business strategies should exist in parallel, which is why it makes sense to develop them together. You’ll likely be surrounded by angel investors and VC-fund managers who will happily advise on business and market strategies. What may be lacking, however, is how a well-curated brand strategy should be used to create a consistent experience to excite and delight your audience. This will contribute to creating long-term success.

Increasingly the boundaries between brand and business strategies are becoming blurred as we delve even deeper into the digital age. Brands exist in the minds of your audience as one ecosystem, no longer separate entities between product/service and identity. A brand is every interaction and touchpoint, from your product interface to how your customer service makes someone feel, from the perception of internal culture to how your brand is portrayed across different channels.

Your brand is the mouthpiece of your business strategy and should be there to create a unified and consistent experience for your audiences.

Consider your position

Considering your competitors is one of the first tasks someone will undertake when thinking up an idea; who else is serving this market, satisfying this need, or solving the problem? How are we going to do it better (or if you’re lucky, be the first company to do it at all)?

Unlike more traditional businesses, a tech start-up may be able to make clear differentiation versus the competition. Many will be disrupting an industry through a radical new approach with tech as the catalyst, versus incumbents and traditional providers. It’s important to map out all the players that operate in the space, as well as considering those adjacent too.

Let’s look at Wise (formally TransferWise) as an example. In the past, transferring money abroad was limited to a few expensive routes, such as traditional banks who would add a hefty markup fee as well as setting their own exchange rates. There were also wire transfer companies in shops across the country, again setting their own rates/fees. Both would take a long time to transact.

Wise looked at a different way to do this, using technology as the enabler. It was able to offer a simple, small fee and a near-perfect exchange rate, relying on a network of accounts across the globe that would hold money and pay locally when someone requested a transfer via their website, and later, smartphones. The speed and cost reduction were game-changers.

Take the time to understand your position in the market – ask yourself who you are serving, why they need you, how your product/service is better and why they should believe you.

Are you the disruptor within the mainstream, or are you revolutionising by creating a new category entirely? Knowing which space you occupy will make it easier to communicate to your audiences and for them to connect with your brand on a deeper level.

Focus on the ‘why’

It may come as no surprise, but companies that succeed in creating a standout brand all have one thing in common. They start with a ‘purpose’. Simply put, your purpose is your reason for doing what you do. It’s what you stand for, and what your customers can expect of you.

This may sound obvious but being clear on what your purpose is from the outset enables you to make strategic business and brand decisions. It acts as the central lens through which all decisions can be viewed.

Create a clear and authentic purpose to act as your foundation on which your entire brand ecosystem can be built – what you set out to do, why you’re doing it and how you will benefit all of those who interact with your brand. In turn, this will allow you to understand which values are fundamental to your brand.

Aligned values

Belonging is innately human. Being a part of something, a community, a tribe. It makes sense then that as consumers, we buy into brands that we feel mirror our values and beliefs and shun those that don’t.

In the age of hyper-transparency where there is nowhere to hide, poor brand behaviour can be exposed with a tweet. Therefore, a company’s values are the driving force in creating resonance. Baking your values (which should be authentic, meaningful, and born out of your purpose) into your business strategy means that customers and prospects can see your authentic self. They can then decide whether theirs align with yours – making a conscious decision to engage with your brand or not. Over time, this will continue to strengthen (or not, if values aren’t lived up to), to create loyalty with your audience.

Starting out, it may be hard to decide who you want to be as a company and a brand. And that’s ok. Your values will evolve and grow with you. For now, set realistic but truthful values - a set of guiding principles that your brand stands for and everyone can aspire to.

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[1] www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-post-mortem

In part 2, we will cover visual and verbal identity (including naming), and how we continue to build our brand ecosystem.

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This article was written for and first published in Brands Journal.