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Venture capitalists: Startup failure as a badge of honor
I've been covering the Techstars meetup this afternoon in downtown Seattle, which kicked off with an interesting panel discussion about what makes technology hubs thrive. There were some of the typical discussion points about strong universities, smart engineers and access to capital.
Vulcan Capital's Steve Hall got things going when he noted that Seattle doesn't quite have a critical mass of venture capital funds and could stand to have one or two more. And then he stirred the pot even more when he implied that entrepreneurs in Seattle don't work as hard as their counterparts in the San Francisco Bay Area, arguing that we in the Pacific Northwest "enjoy our lifestyle too much" and that doesn't necessarily build the most competitive companies. Ouch.
Beyond that, one of the more interesting discussion points occurred in the Q&A when Sampa founder Marcelo Calbucci asked whether there's a higher tolerance for failure in the Bay Area. I captured some video of Madrona's Greg Gottesman and Foundry Group's Brad Feld discussing their thoughts on that topic. (Please excuse the shaky hand and Mike Koss' bald spot).
"I don't think failure is a huge negative. There are certain types of failures, like failure of integrity, that's hard to recover from. But failure of a startup ... that's not a negative and we talk about that as a learning experience," said Gottesman.
About John Cook
John Cook is co-founder and executive editor of TechFlash. He has been covering the technology beat for nearly a decade, writing about startups, entrepreneurs and venture capital, most recently serving as a reporter/blogger at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
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