This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
In January, the collaborative online encyclopediaWikipediacelebrated its tenth anniversary with a small party in west London. Peter Gabriel, Cory Doctorow and Peter Mandelson were among guests who watched Richard Dawkins pay tribute to a most unlikely success story. "Thomas Henry Huxley, when he first read On the Origin of Species, closed it and said, 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that,'" Dawkins said. "I should like to be able to say that if I had read a proposal for Wikipedia ten years ago, I would have said, 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that,' but I wouldn't. I would have said,
'Don't be so stupid. You seriously expect me to believe that you could get thousands of volunteers around the world to give up their time, unpaid, to do editing? That ordinary people will take the trouble to write articles, to correct articles?' But it works."
The reference to natural selectionis apt, because as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales admits, he's had many more plausible ideas fail: his online food-ordering system Loop Lunch; his search engine 3Apes; and who can forget Nupedia, his free online encyclopedia created by experts?
A few days later, Wales meets Wired to discuss the role that failure plays in guiding entrepreneurs to success. He's happy, he says, to be considered a frequent failure. "Because I've had a big success," he says. "Plus there's a philosophy behind this that's very American, very Silicon Valley. It's a cultural value that can be transmitted globally: it's positive." He recalls a group of young entrepreneurs he met in
Korea who were terrified by the possibility of failure. "It was preventing them from being experimental and testing ideas in the same way we do in Silicon Valley. And I just said, 'Look, this is a legitimate project-development technique.'"
But the "fail fast" philosophy is not a justification for burning cash. "Fail faster means try lots of things in succession, looking for ways to minimise the cost of failure, which, ironically, can mean that you're more conservative than daring. In other words, don't put all of your money in a bold move. It's also partly about not getting too emotionally invested in any one way of doing things, otherwise you'll just stick with it way too long, when you should simply cut your losses." He learned this "the hard way" during the 2000-01 dotcom crash. "For a year I continued my business, this search-engine web directory, in the same way. I just kept telling myself, we're going to get another big client. We had this big customer, we made good money, everything was fine and everything collapsed. Rather than failing faster, I just dug in. It never came back. A year later, I was out of money and had to go from 16 employees to four in one very sad day. And I thought, 'It would have been a lot more sensible to fail faster as soon as we lost the big customer.' To go, say, from 16 to eight and have two years' runway instead of one."
Even in Silicon Valley, however, not all failure is celebrated equally. "People in the Valley make a distinction between a bold, innovative concept that just didn't work out, and not being good at what you do," Wales says. "Sometimes in Europe that's missing. So people feel, 'If I have a startup and I fail, my career is over.'
That's quite unhealthy. "Take Foursquare-- a hot startup that's doing well. I actually think Foursquare's going to be fine, but let's say in a year Facebook Places takes the market away. What happens to Foursquare's founders? They probably get a really good job at Google, they probably get a second chance: venture capitalists are interested in their next project because they understand Foursquare as innovative, clever, cool, supertalented guys who'd be back with something else. The point is, if you have a culture that says,
'Well, you've already had one startup and it failed, why should I hire you?', it doesn't support innovation."
So had Wales even imagined Wikipedia becoming as successful as it has? "In its earliest days, I was very optimistic because finally we were doing what I wanted to do," he says. "We had loads of conversations about how to do this project and, quite reasonably, Larry [Sanger, editor-in-chief of Wikipedia's forerunner Nupedia] won those debates because he thought we should be very academic. He made the argument that we should be more academic than Britannica because, as it's from the internet, no one will trust us unless it's very serious. And I thought, you know, it's a good argument. Knowing what we knew then, which was very little about community management, it sounded quite reasonable. It was reasonable. He was right, given our knowledge at that time. "But by the time Wikipedia rolled around, I thought, 'This has always been in the back of my mind: why are we not more open? Why don't we just let people do stuff?' I was optimistic, which is one of my failings and one of my strengths. I'm always superoptimistic about every new idea, which is great, as long as you're mature enough to be able to say, 'I was superexcited about this two months ago and obviously I was on crack.'"
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
