March 2015
Beginner
288 pages
6h 49m
English
book
The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work
by Mark Coopersmith, John Danner
Content preview from The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work
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6Start-UpsLaunching Your Venture in the Land of Failure
Your Role: Passionate Convincer
Startups are like newborn lambs. Give them a chance and they will always try to find new ways to kill themselves.
—Duncan Logan, CEO and founder of startup accelerator RocketSpace
Small Failures Can Lead to Huge Success
In 2009 Kevin Systrom (soon to be joined by his co-founder Mike Krieger) raised $500,000 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz for his new venture, Burbn. He envisioned Burbn as an iPhone app that enabled users to “check in” to locations (similar to Foursquare), make plans, post pictures, and earn points. As they prepared to launch, after more than a year of work, Kevin and Mike gave the product a thorough review and also solicited input from their beta users.
The verdict: Burbn was just too cluttered. The insight: Customers loved the photo application. Armed with this input, Systrom and Krieger simplified Burbn. “[We] basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram,” explains Systrom.1
Using the infrastructure and platform they'd already built for Burbn, the team created Instagram in two months. They made it easy to use and chose a distinctive square photo format similar to old Polaroid photos. Upon release in October 2010, Instagram became a huge hit on the iPhone, garnering more than 10 ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.