Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 40. Learn from Your Failures

Fred Wilson

Fred is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and is an investor in companies including Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare. Fred has been a TechStars mentor since 2008.

	You can't let your failures define you—you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time.
	--Barack Obama in his "back to school speech."

That's so true. It took me a while to learn that lesson.

When I first started out in the venture capital business, I was afraid to make a mistake. Once I started investing and taking board seats myself, I worked super hard to avoid losing money. I went for almost a decade without making a losing investment.

Then, in the aftermath of the Internet bubble, the wheels came off the bus. We wrote off close to 20 investments in the span of two years from late 2000 to late 2002. It was devastating on many levels.

But when I look back on my career, it is not the successes that I think back on most. It is the failures, and particularly those two years when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

When my partner Brad Burnham and I started Union Square Ventures in 2003, we laid out a roadmap for what kind of firm we wanted to create, what kind of investments we'd make, and how we thought the Internet was going to evolve. That work was largely a result of the lessons we both had learned in the aftermath ...