Permission to Fail
After seeing more and more of these &quot;we failed&quot; pieces pop up here, I commend the authors for sharing something so intimate. However, these are starting to strike me as those &quot;everyone gets a trophy&quot; competitions where the goal is sharing the best failure stories and getting a reaffirming pat on the back for things going wrong. I&#x27;m of the supposed generation that is labeled with this &quot;we&#x27;re all winners regardless of what place we finish in the race&quot; mentality, but I don&#x27;t get it. This is where that stereotype comes from.<p>This is perfectly exemplified by the &quot;if Keen busts...we&#x27;ll move on&quot; wording that is pervasive in this. Nevermind the amounts of time, effort and (other people&#x27;s) money that went into building something, and the jobs and families that count on a paycheck. The whole &quot;we&#x27;ll just pat ourselves on the back and move on&quot; way of doing business forgets that there are victims and potentially long-reaching impacts for every failure. It can&#x27;t be that simple and easy to walk away, it really shouldn&#x27;t be.<p>People fail, startups fail, etc. all the time. But it&#x27;s starting to sound like a competition to see who failed the best the more of these I read. It just seems like attention-seeking behavior sometimes, or maybe just slick marketing perhaps to try and boost that falling revenue. Who knows. I mean, it made it to the top of HN, right? Probably got a few thousand eyeballs out of that at the very least for free.<p>On the other hand, posting about failure and turmoil for a going business concern can&#x27;t be good for customer retention. If I were a competitor, I&#x27;d jump all over this opportunity to lure some of those lucrative clients away by leveraging the fear of investing their time, money and effort into a potentially problem-riddled organization that by-and-large accepts, even embraces, a high rate of failure. Large enterprises don&#x27;t like hearing about these types of problems with their vendors as they are inherently quite risk averse. Ultimately, I fear that this company, and others that have done the same, will soon realize this but it&#x27;ll too late to save themselves from a flight of customers. Hey, who knows, prove me wrong.<p>Anyway, just my opinion. I&#x27;m not trying to be negative, but just relaying a different perspective from someone who&#x27;s been around the industry for some time.