There have been over 300 new startups launched in Dublin over the last year. It’s a great stat and one which genuinely underpins our ‘startup country’ marketing. I think there’s a growing realisation that our entire growth strategy is essentially predicated on starting new companies. Unfortunately I don’t think people have also grasped that failure is an essential part of this same strategy.
Most startups fail for any number of this reasons. THIS IS NORMAL. Ireland has built a genuinely good ecosystem for starting companies (and the numbers seem to be proving this out). But we’ve got to stop obsessing with people’s failures for the sake of them. Yes, a lot of property developers lost a lot of money. Yes, by all means analyse how it happened. But stop turning it into some kind of fetish.
It’s a slippery slope to suggest content policy for the media so I’ll suggest it for everyone else instead: Stop perving on the failure porn.
Being serious about startups as a country means being accepting of failure. It’s time to move on with our attitude.
“I admit I fucked up/but everybody fucks up” –Lil’ Wayne, Something you forgot
Comments on this entry are closed.