After I wrote about the importance of having fun at work I received a note from Ellen Twomey, Managing Director of Fugitive Labs in Atlanta. She said the Opinion really hit home and that fun was a great benchmark.

Intrigued, I looked up Fugitive Labs and it looks fun too!

But more interestingly I saw something on their website that I hadn’t seen before – a case study that featured a product of theirs that didn’t work…

I love that. No one bats one thousand and anyone who represents nothing but success is hiding something. Moreover, failing is important. Not only is it how we learn, but if you haven’t failed yet, failure is coming because you haven’t yet pushed the boundaries of what’s possible. And if you haven’t done that, it may mean that you don’t have enough experience.

For example, one of the common questions we got back when we were raising capital was “Can you tell me about an investment you made that hasn’t done well?” We all have those and we had one of those then as we do now and will in the future and so would tell people about what went wrong and what we were trying to do to make it right. Usually it would end then and we would move on to another topic.

But one of the more interesting reactions to our answer to that question was someone who said “Huh, that’s not that bad. Good for you. But we only invest in managers who have had something really, really, really bad happen to them.”

That struck me. On the one hand it was preposterous. Isn’t avoiding catastrophe a sign that you might be good at something? But on the other, there was logic to it. Perhaps the only way to avoid a catastrophe is to have already had one and therefore know what it looks like when one’s coming. 

Either way, everyone fails at something eventually and I think the world would be a more interesting place if we were able to follow the lead of Fugitive Labs and put our failures front and center on our websites, resumes, and LinkedIn profiles.

P.S. Permanent Equity’s investing team is hiring. Click here for the details.

– By Tim Hanson

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