Disconnect: Asia’s startup culture needs to embrace failure

Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

Late last week, my colleague Harsimran wrote about the sad case of an Indian startup founder who killed himself after his company failed. It’s a story that stuck with me over the weekend, in part because the more I think about it, the more I think it is our fault.

When I say “our” here, I’m referring to the Asian startup scene as a whole. There may be massive cultural differences separating many Asian nations, but sadly, failure is something that most Asian cultures agree upon. It’s as much a source of shame in China or Japan as it is in India. Across Asia, there’s a heavy stigma that’s often associated with failure in business, and it can lead to tragedy.

I’m not just talking about depression or suicide, although Lucky Gupta Aggarwal is certainly not the first startup founder to have faced those demons. Beyond those sorts of thankfully-rare tragedies, there is another cost for the stigma of failure: innovation.

Fear is the mind-killer

Any successful VC or entrepreneur worth their salt will tell you that there’s no innovation without risk. Innovation, after all, by definition means treading a new path, and the comes with inherent risks. The higher the risk, the more likely an enterprise is to fail. That reality can dissuade Asian founders from taking big risks to begin with, since failure can carry such a heavy social stigma. Everyone is at least a little bit afraid of taking their shot at a startup, coming up empty-handed, and then being looked down on by their peers.

The heavier the stigma of failure, the greater the likely burden of that fear. And fear, though sometimes a useful motivator, can be a very dangerous thing. As Frank Herbert wrote in his seminal science fiction novel Dune:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

In the context of entrepreneurship, fear of failure leads to playing it safe. It leads to avoiding the kinds of big risks, the moon shots that can bring about true change. It’s fear of failure, in part, that causes a huge boom in copycat startups whenever a particular sector gets hot. Why risk trying to sell a new idea when you know you can secure funding for another O2O startup or another P2P lender?

Fear of failure is holding us back.

This is our fault

As participants in the Asian startup scene, we are all at least somewhat responsible for this atmosphere. True, the stigma around failure in many Asian cultures goes back centuries – we did not originate it. But we do perpetuate it in the ways that we discuss failure in the context of the startup scene.

Tech in Asia has, at least at times, been a part of this problem. This has been an atypical week for us – reader Li Shing Chan penned an excellent piece about embracing failure, and VC Fred Wilson also shared some of his thoughts on meaningful failures – but for the most part we’re still all about success over here. Even though it’s the exception rather than the rule, we write about success far more often than failure. And our coverage of failures can be somewhat bleak.

We need to do better