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Entrepreneurs don't fail they adjust their course and try again

Facebook

Back in November 2006 I was at a recruiting conference with my peers and I was speaking with a couple of friends and associates that I consider very intelligent.

The topic of the conversation was social networking site Facebook, and what we viewed as a couple of major strategic mistakes that their young founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, 22 had made. The first was one that had caused a revolt of Facebook users that initially wasn't handled so well.  At least as far as Facebook users were concerned. Facebook users responded with a major online petition that reminded people of the U.S. Vietnam anti-war rallies in the 60's.

"On September 5, 2006, Facebook introduced two new controversial features called "News Feed" and "Mini-Feed". The first of the new features, News Feed, appears on every Facebook member's home page, displaying recent Facebook activities of a member's friends. The second feature, Mini-Feed, keeps a log of similar events on each member's profile page.[26] Members can manually delete items from their Mini-Feeds if they wish to do so.

Some Facebook members still feel that the ability to opt-out of the entire News Feed and Mini-Feed system is necessary, as evidenced by a statement from the Students Against Facebook News Feed group, which peaked at over 740,000 members.[27] However, according to recent news articles, members have widely regarded the additional privacy options as an acceptable compromise.[28]"  -- Wikipedia reference

Following on the feels of pissing off the majority of their users they spurned an estimated one billion dollar bid from Yahoo! to purchase Facebook. It looked for all the world like Facebook would quickly become another example of a web 2.0 dot.wrong. 

I couldn't be more pleased to see the latest news that Zuckerberg and company have managed an epic turnaround just six months later. According to Reuters in an article published yesterday titled Facebook unveils new site design amid growth surge, they've more than doubled their user base since the time of their major struggle with their users.

"But after a rapid response to online protests that involved hundreds of thousands of its members, Facebook subsequently saw its growth explode to 18 million active users from around 7.5 million active users before the membership crisis." -- Reuters reporter Eric Auchard

What did Zuckerberg and company put in the secret sauce that led to their major rebound?

"Seeking to avert any new surprises for its members, Facebook has invited more than 100,000 users to comment on the site's redesigned features over the past several weeks.

The feedback led Facebook to make changes to the final product, including giving users the ability to control if an event or group is publicized on the community portal pages that connect together member profiles in any Facebook sub-network.

"A lot of the changes are very subtle. We make small changes instead of huge things," said a chastened Zuckerberg." ---- Reuters reporter Eric Auchard

The entrepreneurial axiom of failure being just more feedback with which to manage your course corrections would apply well here. Innovation doesn't happen when everything just falls into place in a laboratory.  Great companies are like great individuals and great entrepreneurs, on average, they are better at learning from their mistakes and bouncing back.

In a recent article in Fortune Magazine, Dyson Vacuum cleaner inventor James Dyson was quoted as saying:

"An engineer's life is 99% failure. So failure clearly doesn't depress me.  I think that it has the reverse effect on me.  You don't learn from success, and your successes are few and far between. Failure is like a drug, actually.  You go to work each day excited, because you know there are hundreds of problems there that you haven't solved.  It's living on the edge, because you might come up with the solution or you might not.  The future of the company depends on it."  -- Julie Schlosser, Fortune Magazine, March 12, 2007


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Entrepreneurs don't fail they adjust their course and try again

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