Radical Thinking: Why "Fail Fast" Is Failing You with Radhika Dutt

Radhika, you built your career, as I said in the intro, around challenging some of Silicon Valley's most popular phrases such as iterate quickly, failing fast, just start driving and figure it out.

What led you to question these approaches, and what patterns were you seeing that convinced you that there had to be a better way?

You know, I realized that we needed to see the world differently from the Silicon Valley approach just because of my own personal experience.

So let me share a little bit about, you know, the product diseases that I've run into.

So back in 2000, as I was graduating from university, you know, I'd just finished electrical engineering at MIT, and right out of our dorm rooms, we were starting our startup.

We had a grand vision, and our vision was revolutionizing wireless.

And we had caught the disease I now call hero syndrome, where our focus was on being big, on scaling.

The way we were measuring success was by the amount of fundraising that we had done, the big client logos that we had on our website.

It all sounds very familiar, right? And this was 25 years ago, and yet we see the same sort of product diseases that are just as prevalent today in startups.

So what I've realized was this whole Silicon Valley idea of you just start a startup, give it funding, just keep iterating, find product market fit, it doesn't really work that way.

The reality is you have two to three pivots before you run out of either money or momentum.

That is reality.

Whereas just the pretty picture that we have or the survivor bias that happens is-

Mm-hmm

...

there are a few unicorns that make it by just iterating, and we've come to believe that, oh, that's how you, you build products.

It works for the VC business model.

The VC business model is I'm gonna invest in 10 startups.

I just need one of these to make it big.

Everything else, I want it to either fail quickly or make it big because I don't wanna invest in a, in a middling startup, right?

Right.

And so from a VC perspective, that's really where these mantras come from, this idea of go big or go home, fail fast, learn fast, this idea of just keep iterating, keep pivoting till you find product market fit.

It all works for the VC because that's their business model.

I invest in 10, just one needs to make it big.

But from an entrepreneur's perspective, you have two to three pivots before you run out of money and momentum.