TRY AGAIN

Be willing to learn and repeat.

I had a few companies that I started that didn't make it and I was very sad about them, but I pretty much had vowed to never go back and try a company like those again because I had failed at them. And then I went to a conference, where Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn was speaking. And he was talking about how LinkedIn, I think, was something like his fourth social network. He tried one and it did work, he tried a second one in a different way and it didn't work but he was really passionate about social networks he thought they were very important. He tried a third one, didn't work and he finally had the right angle with LinkedIn. He had the right idea on how to build virality with your phone book and your contacts, he had the right value proposition and maybe the right timing.

I was very inspired by that talk where he talked about each one of these tries as an “at-bat”. He thought of it like, if you strike out at an at-bat, you don't never ever play baseball again. You try an assess what happened with that pitching, what did I swing at that I shouldn't have swung at and how can you go back and have another at-bat and do a better job.

I never really thought about the companies that I was starting as at-bats. But listening to it that way really made me think about, well if some of those companies that I was really passionate about didn’t make it but if I go back and take another at-bat but with a new stance, you know literally like an at-bat with a different angle and with learning and possibly with new timing. Could I make a go of it again?

And I actually went back and took a look at two companies of ours that didn't make it but that I was very, very passionate about, actually three companies, and I started them again. Different names, different people, different products but the same basic areas. And of those three companies one of them failed but two of them became wild successes and are growing today. And I'm so glad that I heard that Reid Hoffman talk to give me the confidence to actually go back and take a lesson from what I had learned as opposed to giving up from the thing that I have learned.

And one other way of looking at it was, I once had an advisor and CEO coach who was talking to me in a prior company, before I started Idealab called Knowledge Adventure and we had just lost some money on some project. I think we had lost $2,000,000 on a very expensive painful lesson and he was giving me advice about it and said, Bill, you just took a $2,000,000 class. Are you going to attend that class or are you going to skip that class? If you learn from everything you just did, you could turn that into much, much more than what you paid for that class.

And I really think that that applies to everything in business. Business really is a journey and you have to take into account everything you learned along the way, to really make something better and better each time, and that you really should be willing to try again.

Be willing to learn, rinse and repeat.