2003-12-29 12:00:00

Followup to MMM

Due largely to a link from Slashdot (thanks!), "Make More Mistakes" has endured the scrutiny of more readers than most of my other essays.  I've been getting a great deal of feedback, which I do appreciate.

Lots of people have asked me how SourceGear has been able to financially survive all those awful mistakes I've made.  Some have checked my background and speculated that I funded all those mistakes using money I got from the Spyglass IPO, and therefore a posture of risk-taking is appropriate only for those who are already rich, and therefore my article doesn't really apply.  That's essentially incorrect, but there is a grain of truth here.  I made some nice money when Spyglass went public (but nowhere near enough to retire).  The presence of financial cushion sometimes has made it easier to take a risk, even though I am already a risk-taker by nature.

But in actuality, very little money has ever flowed from me to SourceGear.  With the exception of a small amount of capital we received from a few angel investors, SourceGear has been entirely funded from its own revenues.  If this doesn't seem to add up, then keep in mind that half the story of SourceGear is not being told right now.

The "mistakes" article tells the story of my failures, but we've experienced an approximately equal collection of successes.  I'm not going to tell those stories right now.  It should be sufficient to know that our losses happened in the context of some wins, some of them quite large.  Each time I took a risk, I tried to be sure that the size of the risk was appropriate for the company's resources at that time.

If you are just starting out, or if your company is much smaller than SourceGear, then my mistakes may seem enormous to you.  Absent my bad bets, I could be driving a Ferrari right now.  Still, none of these mistakes were fatal for SourceGear.

Regardless of the scale of your business, the central point of my article still applies:  "Make all the non-fatal mistakes that you can -- don't make any of the fatal ones."  Only you can figure out what might be "fatal" for your particular situation.  Smaller firms should take smaller risks.  Bigger firms can take much bigger risks without placing the survival of the company in jeopardy. 

Either way, choosing to take no risks at all is an excellent algorithm for avoiding success.