How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

The site was a subsidiary of Dilbert.com , which had plenty of traffic, so it wasn’t hard to get exposure. The problem is that the ideas people submitted were so awful they didn’t even rise to the level of crackpot. It didn’t take long for the site to be populated with so much well-intentioned garbage that it became worthless. We shut it down.
    In the process of failing I learned a lot about Web site design and implementing new features. That knowledge has served me well on several projects.
    Video on Internet: During the dot-com frenzy I was approached by the founders of a start-up that planned to allow anyone with a computer to post videos on the Internet for the collective viewing pleasure of all. They asked me to use my
Dilbert
spotlight to help get the word out. The start-up didn’t have much funding, so they offered me a generous chunk of stock instead. I accepted. I talked about the new service in my
Dilbert
newsletter, posted my own funny videos, and did some interviews on the topic.
    Several years later, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and the shareholders made a fortune. Unfortunately, the video service in my story was not YouTube. It was a service that came before. The company I worked with was premature because Internet speeds were not quite fast enough for online video sharing to catch on. The company struggled for a few years and then shut down. YouTube got the timing right. This was about the time Istarted to understand that timing is often the biggest component of success. And since timing is often hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck.
    Grocery Home Delivery : An engineer friend and I decided to work together to create technology that would make home delivery of groceries more practical. The idea was to create technology that would allow a delivery van to open your garage door so the driver could place the delivery inside even when you were not home, perhaps in a cooler. Our plan was to sell the technology to grocery stores that wanted to start delivering. I know, I know: lots of security concerns. I’ll spare the details, but we thought we could design some safeguards to bring the risks to nearly zero. We could have a long debate on whether that was possible, but it didn’t matter because my friend got busy on other projects and bowed out. The idea didn’t get far enough to generate any benefits in knowledge or talent, but I hadn’t put much effort into it either.
    Webvan: Some years later, in the dot-com era, a start-up called Webvan promised to revolutionize grocery delivery. You could order grocery-store items over the Internet and one of Webvan’s trucks would load your order at the company’s modern distribution hub and set out to service all the customers in your area. I figured Webvan would do for groceries what Amazon had done for books. It was a rare opportunity to get in on the ground floor. I bought a bunch of Webvan stock and felt good about myself. When the stock plunged, I bought some more. I repeated that process several times, each time licking my lips as I acquired ever-larger blocks of the stock at prices I knew to be a steal.
    When management announced they had achieved positive cash flow at one of their several hubs, I knew I was onto something. If it worked in one hub, the model was proven, and it would surely work at others. I bought more stock. Now I owned approximately, well, a boatload.
    A few weeks later, Webvan went out of business. Investing in Webvan wasn’t the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s a contender. The loss wasn’t enough to change my lifestyle. But boy, didit sting psychologically. In my partial defense, I knew it was a gamble, not an investment per se.
    What I learned from that experience is that there is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company’s management. Now I diversify and let the lying get smoothed out by all the other