Just Own the L. OWN IT!
I’m about 5,000 miles from home this week on the road meeting with customers, partners and providers. Doing what I do to grow my business. My email/text box has been blowing up today with news about happenings in the tech community. After listening to variations on what I deem “fake news” I decided I wouldnt sleep well tonight unless I penned this (and finished catching up on email from the past five days…). The topic is owning the L where L equals The Loss.
We live in a society where losing teams are rewarded as much or more as winning teams. Little johnnie gets a trophy for trying and no one seems to really ever fail because they tried. This is great. This is dandy but its not reality. A loss is a loss. You know it when you see it and you especially know it when you are a part of it. I’ve been part of a few losses. I remember when we couldnt pay bills at hotels and when my last paycheck was a chair and a laptop. At that company we LOST because we spent more time raising money than raising customers. I remember when we shutdown our online yardsale platform because we didnt have a revenue model and we got burned out on doing data cleaning work every Thursday night so that we could produce great results for our Triangle wide yardsale platform. That platform had great possibilities but it didnt work out as a ongoing businesss therefore it was a LOSS. I learned a ton from those experiences which helps inform me better about how to navigate my current venture. I established relationships that remain valuable even today almost 25 yrs later but it doesnt take away from the basic fact that we didnt win we LOST as it relates to growing and building a business.
I screw up on a slightly above average ratio. Personally and professionally I am a amalgam of good and bad. I take risks regularly. Some payoff a few dont. When they dont at some point I have to own the LOSS and deal with it. While not perfect at this I do consider myself a work in progress and I am always looking to improve myself in this regard. For those of you who have been bombarding me today please know that the deal you are referencing for me is a LOSS so please dont congratulate me or expect me to pretend like it is anything other than that..a L. It’s okay that it is a L that is how this all works we take risk and some play out and some dont but sticking our heads in the sand and pretending like it is anything other than what it is is frankly how we ended up with a Ronald McDonald president.
For our tech community to mature we need to own our wins and equally own our losses. This is the natural state of the tech ecosystem development and until we learn to respect it we will never truly grow into the community that earns respect on the global stage.
Dont try to say spoiled milk is buttermilk. Say it’s nasty and dont drink it.
Okay this is out of my system and I can go back to the emails and the glass of cava that I’m drinking alone in a hotel bar someplace in Northern Europe hacking out opportunity and reward for my team, my family and myself. For the others like me out there and back home “Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant”!
So a edit on this particular rant. I got a call from a experienced entrepreneur last night around midnight my time. We spent about 20 min talking through some acute challenges he is facing with a company pivot. Further his CTO was dealing with health issues. Either of these issues would be enough to throw in the towel but we didnt talk about any of that. We talked about the fact that building a real business is hard and sometimes the shit is overwhelming. We rang off with no talk of new ventures doing dog biscuits or anything else. I bet he gets up this morning and gets back to work making the pivot work. Salute!
