There's a particular strain of startup orthodoxy that has calcified into something approaching religious doctrine: the idea that failure is not just acceptable, but virtuous. That founders who don't fail haven't tried hard enough. That the path to success runs directly through spectacular, public collapse.
This trend is being sold as inevitable. It deserves more skepticism than it is getting.
The narrative is everywhere. Founders wear their bankruptcies like merit badges. Venture capitalists speak reverently about the "learning" that comes from burning through millions of dollars. A failed company becomes a credential, shorthand for risk-taking and resilience. There's something almost romantic about it, the way tech culture has glamorized the crash-and-burn as proof of ambition.
But this mythology obscures something uncomfortable: not all failures teach the same lessons, and some failures destroy things that shouldn't be destroyed.
Consider what actually happens when a startup fails. Employees lose income and health insurance, often with little warning. Founders may land softly thanks to networks and prior success, but their teams rarely do. Communities that relied on these services lose access. The failure itself becomes a data point that the founder can weaponize in their next pitch, while the people who worked there simply move on, resume in hand.
Meanwhile, the venture capital machinery that funded the failed company sustains no real consequence. The narrative that matters isn't "this company wasted resources," but "the founder learned something valuable." Failure becomes an asset class rather than an actual loss.
What troubles me most is how this mythology encourages a specific kind of recklessness. If failure is just tuition in the school of entrepreneurship, then there's little reason to think carefully about resource allocation, team welfare, or whether something should exist in the first place. Move fast, break things, and if it breaks badly, well, you've learned.
Except some things shouldn't be treated as experiments. When a company handling sensitive data implodes, the breach happens anyway. When an app serves vulnerable users, the shutdown harms them regardless of what the founder learned. The "fail fast" ethos works differently depending on who bears the cost of failure.
There's also a survivorship bias baked into this mythology. We celebrate the founders whose failures preceded success. We don't spend as much time talking about the people whose failures ended their careers, or who never got the chance to fail publicly and expensively because they lacked the networks or capital to try in the first place.
The smarter conversation would distinguish between different kinds of failure. There's the failure of execution that teaches real lessons about markets, product fit, or team dynamics. Then there's the failure of judgment, where someone was building something that shouldn't have been built, or building it irresponsibly. These aren't the same thing, but the mythology treats them equivalently.
I'm not arguing that entrepreneurs should be risk-averse or that failure is genuinely shameful. That way lies a different kind of dysfunction, where nothing gets attempted and genuine innovation dies. The problem is specifically with the romanticization, the way failure has become divorced from consequence and rebranded as growth.
What if we asked harder questions instead? What if we evaluated failures based on what was learned versus what was lost? What if we considered whether the person who failed is likely to make different choices next time, or simply has more capital for the next attempt?
The startup world needs to maintain some tolerance for failure. But it doesn't need the mythology. It doesn't need the unexamined assumption that failure automatically contains wisdom. Sometimes failure just means something didn't work out, people were hurt, and resources were wasted.
That's not inevitably instructive. It's just failure.