Success tastes sweet only after a Failure

The best founders I know have scars. Not just success stories. If you’ve never hired the wrong person, you can’t fully value a great one.

If you’ve never built a product that flopped, you can’t recognize true product market fit.

If you’ve never had to fight through a downturn, you can’t appreciate sustainable growth.

The bad apples matter. Because without them, the good ones look ordinary. In venture and in leadership, failure isn’t just inevitable, it’s instructional. The lessons that stick aren’t from pitch decks or case studies. They come from lived experience. From the mistakes that force you to adapt, to rethink, to become sharper.

ChubbyBrain Insights data shows that 70% of startups fail within 20 months of raising their first round. Brutal but also clarifying. The founders who survive aren’t the ones who avoided failure entirely. They’re the ones who turned those failures into operating wisdom.

As an investor, this is what I watch for: not perfection, but perspective. Founders who have seen both sides of the apple, the bitter and the sweet and know how to turn both into fuel.

In business, as in life, you don’t understand success until you’ve survived failure. The question is not whether you’ll face it, but what you’ll do with it.