The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work

14Stage Five: ReflectTurn Failure from a Regret to a Resource

Your Role: Inquisitive Student

Searching for the What, When, How, and Why, Before the Who

Since its founding in 1998, Google has changed the way the connected world interacts with information and one another. From online search and Gmail to maps and self-driving cars, Google has been fearless in its pursuit of new concepts, new businesses, and new business models.

In addition to the many internal businesses Google investigates and launches, in 2009 it launched Google Ventures. Since then, Google has invested in more than 250 companies, not only in information technology but also in other sectors such as cancer treatment, transportation, and energy use.

Joe Kraus, a serial entrepreneur himself, is one of the lead investors at Google Ventures, a position he took on after Google acquired one of the companies he founded. We spoke with him to gain deeper insights into how Google approaches risk-taking and failure. In Joe's words:

Google processes failure extremely well. For example, there's a regular meeting at Google that is the most impressive forum I've ever seen to address the issue of learning from failure. At these meetings, a variety of experiments in search are explained and the results are presented. The most amazing thing is that everyone separates the success or failure of the experiment from the failure of ...