Initial failures, eternal learnings

It must be painful, if it's not, then it does not count.

Jab, cross, hook.

DISClAIMER : This will be the first of a long series of boxing metaphors. I’m a boxer and have fought competitively for a while. I believe there are great teachings in stepping into the ring and trading punched with another fella in front of screaming fans. Let me quote Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face.”

In September 2013, one of the best boxers in the history of the noble art, Floyd Jr. Mayweather, was scheduled to fight against the rising star from Mexico: the now very famous Saul Canelo, 23 years old at that time and known for his impressive knockout power and speed. What was supposed to be a mega-fight turned out to be a demonstration: Master Floyd completely schooled Canelo, making him look like an amateur. Floyd dodged any attack with ridiculous ease and dominated the 12 rounds as if he were fighting against a complete beginner. Canelo was obsessed with throwing power shots and knocking out his opponent, and he was unable to adapt, receiving deadly counterattacks throughout the fight and losing precious energy. That day, he learned the difference between good and great and became a new fighter. What was supposed to be a glorious night for the new face of boxing ended up being a genius defensive performance of one of the greatest of all time. Had Canelo given up on this day, we could have said Floyd just sent him back to anonymity like he did to many fighters before him.

Ten years later, any boxing enthusiast who has been interested in the sweet science for long enough will confirm the following fact: Saul Canelo has been forever changed by his early, painful failure against Floyd, which made him the insanely good fighter he is today, widely praised for his defensive movements and his counters. Canelo basically learned more in one night than he did in a decade. This hard, horrible disappointment of a fight turned out to be the birth of one of the most respected fighters in the world, and a multiple-time world champion. Saul Canelo was fortunate enough that this failure came early enough, but also that it was sufficiently painful for him to remember. If you lose at zero cost and have no skin-in-the game, you will not learn anything : here lies the main difference between bureaucrats, some founders and entrepreneurs, your failure will be your scarves, instead of public debts shouldered by the group, and you would rather turning that damn feedback loop on if you don’t want to get schooled another time in the ring, and receive multiple body shots and uppercuts just because you can’t improve and learn from your mistakes. And trust me, uppercuts and body shots are not a pleasant thing to receive.

You will get knocked down

Dear fellow entrepreneur, I offer you a few words of truth :

You will make mistakes. You will spend money on stupid ads. You will hire that promising junior analyst who turns out to be a complete mess. You will spend days developing a useless feature. You will stick to that market hypothesis that turned out horribly wrong. You will hire useless advisors and deal with jackass intermediaries. You will be approached and possibly get scammed by conmen, liars, egocentrics, and incompetent people. You will give them equity and regret it. You will go all-in on weird contracts while easy money is right under your nose. You will buy your new hire an expensive MacBook when you could just ask them to work temporarily on their own laptop because you are broke. You will lose time on social networks posting achievements nobody cares about. You will implement those stupid methods to improve communication when you just need to fire some toxic idiots. You will wait too long before firing people or giving your best employees a raise. You will be unfair with the shy and shy with the unfair. You will tell everyone your company is doing great whereas you can't even expense a $1 dollar pizza slice. You will look for problems instead of bringing solutions. You will write beautiful code that doesn't ship because it's useless and awful code that breaks, and you won't even know why. You will buy too many domain names, follow stupid trends, read and apply tips from LinkedIn influencers. You will make more and more mistakes. You will feel your company is worthless and consider quitting. You will get knocked down. And, more than anything else, you will suffer a lot when any of those things happen to you for the first time.

You got the point. Entrepreneurship is not a by-the-book discipline where you can simply apply and duplicate the exact same approach to every problem. Almost always, it involves humans, and we are non-rational, emotional beings, often engaged in an endless dick-measuring contest¹. The beauty of it lies in its empiricism: the only way to improve globally is to actually get worse locally, make those horrible mistakes first, learn from them quickly enough, and then move on. I know some of you may think that reading this list might be a sufficient warning message to avoid most of those fallacious paths. It's not; you actually need to build some gut-level intuition to get those things hardcoded into your brain, to rewire yourself so you don’t get knocked down too easily. Just like Canelo Alvarez, you will enter the arena full of promises and lose your first battle against competitors you were sure to beat in the blink of an eye. You just missed the main point: if they are in a favourable situation, it means they understood something most actors did not understand and found a way to leverage it.

The big mistake

It's 1:30 AM at night, and you can't sleep because of that stupid decision you made a few days ago to invest in a 12-month software subscription paid annually, although you just found out too late that some pretty good and cheap alternatives exist that actually meet your requirements. You acted like a spoiled kid who wanted a toy, and now you can't sleep. Believe it or not, this is not your worst mistake for the week because here comes the tragedy: you decide to open LinkedIn.

If you're a startup founder, your feed probably looks quite similar to mine. To put it simply, everyone is either growing 10,000% in the last few weeks, signing crazy partnerships with Nike, NASA, CIA, the masters of the universe, my mom, and God himself. All employees are so glad to be part of the great adventure that this startup is, and if some founders talk about some failures, it's only to bring you their latest successes just because they are so resilient and so great, and so attractive, and so healthy, and that they wake up at 4:30AM and take some ice baths. Everyone is remote, working four days. Everyone is rich, happy, consensual, and if they're not too satisfied about their job, it's just because they actually have something better like a beautiful and empathetic wife or husband, a gifted baby who knows how to code at 3yo, a dog, or whatever they can show you to seek validation. No failures, no pain, no single and lonely people struggling to make a few bucks, just a weird blueprint of people posing with their company t-shirt and innocently sharing their successes and their personal lives I could not care less about. Let's not even talk about HR influencers and corporate public relations officers; they are like that little leaf of basil you add to a delicious risotto: it doesn't make it taste better, but you can't help but adding it.

If you're funding your business out of your own pocket and paying for your mistakes, you'll relate to this paragraph more than anyone else. Sorry, VC-backed founders reading this newsletter, but you can't truly comprehend the struggle. In this serialized book, I'll be outlining a systematic method for analyzing and deriving actionable feedback from mistakes and failures. But for now, my fellow entrepreneurs, that's all I've got.

Love your failures and learn from them.

Every single one of them will be an anecdote one day. If you think they will traumatize you for the rest of your life, just remember that you are nothing but cosmic dust and will end up as cosmic dust.

Embrace your pain: it’s what will make you go for the greatest.

Make enormous mistakes, but don’t make the same mistake twice.

You have skin-in-the-game and accountability: that’s your responsibility, or it will never be your reward.

Don’t listen to LinkedIn posts; they are just people from the matrix aiming to make you feel bad. They don’t even exist in real life. I post on LinkedIn daily by the way.

Get knocked down, epically. Raise, heroically.

Repeat until you win, and then post your bank account screenshot on LinkedIn with the following caption: “Ya’ll corporate losers.”

Do it before paying for loads of champagne and sports cars.

Actually, don’t buy yourself champagne and sports cars; buy books, read them, and if you really fancy some superficial stuff, get yourself a French brand. They are the best.

Don’t start going to the Opera just because you got rich, and get yourself some 2Pac vinyl.

Don’t actually post insults on LinkedIn, even if it’s tempting. And if you do, target Monsanto or some big corp, not individuals. Actually, do whatever the f*** you want.

Don’t comment on VC posts. They are also part of the matrix and don’t even exist in real life.

Don’t blindly follow tips from overfunded folks who fail on someone else’s money and sell worthless equities to greater fools; their feedback loop is too slow, and they don’t feel the pain. You can’t do it their way most of the time.

Don’t post every achievement because nobody actually gives a damn. Don’t post your failures either; they are your private, most beautiful trophies from a well-lived life. Love and cherish them. Actually, post your failures, but don’t forget to make things valuable for your business. An audience is useful, unfortunately.

Do, fail, improve, repeat.

Keep the faith.

1. Applies to the whole spectrum of gender, unfortunately.