📚 Radar Reads • Issue #5

I just finished reading Benny Blanco’s new book, F*ck Failure.

I found out about it almost by accident. I had the TV on in the background; The Tonight Show started, and Benny Blanco came on promoting a book called F*ck Failure.

I kind of knew who he was. I knew he was in music and recognized him from somewhere, but I’m definitely not the person who can tell you everything about the music industry.

I thought the title was interesting and something we can all relate to, so I was intrigued and ordered it right away.

The book is a fast and short read, which I thought was pretty good. Benny makes the book feel like a friend telling you a bunch of interesting stories about his life experiences, success, and many failures.

I found myself agreeing with a lot of his thinking about failure, his career, and how he got to where he is. I did go on and search more about him and his music, and realized I already knew a lot of his great collaborations on songs I really like.

The main ideas in his book are pretty simple:

While I was reading it, I kept thinking about entrepreneurship and ventures. It also has some great angles on personal life and the importance of mental health.

Benny is basically an entrepreneur in the music world. He built a career producing music, became an artist himself, wrote a cookbook, has now written this book, and keeps trying different things, as he mentions.

That is entrepreneurship. You try many things. Some of them work, some don’t, but you must learn how to adjust and just keep moving forward.

If you are an entrepreneur, you must know failing comes in different shapes and sizes daily. Many times, it’s going to be a massive failure. Other times, it’s going to be something small that nobody is going to notice. It could be a product that is not going to work, something a customer says, a customer saying no, a person you wanted to hire who didn’t join, hiring the wrong person, or building something and later realizing nobody really wants to use it. I’ve lived every one of these.

Venture capital is not that different.

You pass on a founder you should have backed. You invest in a company you had conviction in, and it doesn’t work. You find a great company too late. You lose a deal. You miss the deadline. You can’t convince enough LPs to back an investment. You misunderstand a market. Sometimes you simply get it wrong.

Failure is built into both businesses. The question is what you do with it. This also reminds me of a repeated comment from Mark Cuban that goes something like: you can fail many times, but you just need to get it right that one time.

One of the first things that comes to mind for me and founders is: Are you dreaming big enough?

In venture, we are constantly asking the same thing. Can this become really big? Can this company scale? Is this a TAM expansion or a zero-sum game? Can this potentially return the fund?

At the same time, dreaming big does not mean starting big. Usually, history has taught us it is quite the opposite. Start with one problem, maybe one that you can really relate to, talk to customers, launch that one product, and be the best at that wedge.

That focus is even more important today with AI. AI makes it very easy to fall right into the trap of building anything and everything you might want to build. (This is something we discussed in a previous post on Seedradar Ventures, “The New Startup Trap: Building Too Much, Too Fast.” If you’re curious, check it out.)

Starting small forces focus before scaling and diversifying.

This was probably the idea I related to the most. Failure by itself is not particularly useful.

Failing better is.

Test something, collect data, learn something, adapt or change the product, change your opinion and move faster and smarter the next time.

I think this is why experience still matters a lot in the AI era. We are starting to see younger founders building incredible things, some as early as high school, which I think is amazing and shows the pace at which things are moving today. At the same time, we are seeing experienced and repeat founders, even in their 50s, getting access to amazing tools, knowing what to build, learning from past scars, and still failing, but at a much lower rate.

I really think that combination is incredibly powerful.

Entrepreneurs who have built and failed before usually have the ability to identify things from experience. No AI model is going to teach you that. They know how to identify when a client is not going to buy their product, when they made a mistake on a hire and how painful that can be for the team, when it’s time to pivot because something is not working. They usually know the road because they have scars and those scars are a competitive advantage in this world and increase their chances of success.

This might be my favorite chapter simply because it should be obvious, yet apparently, it isn’t.

Don’t be a dick to your team.

Don’t be a dick to your customers.

Don’t be a dick to your investors.

Don’t become a dick when you become successful.

Just don’t be a dick. If at any point you are one, since everyone has a bad day and can be one, just acknowledge it, apologize, talk about it, and move on.

The same goes for venture capital.

I have come across plenty of people in the venture world who forget that there is an entrepreneur on the other side of the table putting years of their life into something.

I do think in venture, firms have the right to say no, disagree, think that the company has a terrible idea, or decide it will be a terrible investment. Founders can say no to investors too, but none of that requires being an asshole. (To be fair, sometimes it’s the founder who acts like a jerk, especially when venture dollars are in abundance and investors are chasing the deal.)

I admire successful founders and investors even more when they reach the top of their career. It’s great to see when they remain normal, approachable, and respectful to everyone around them.

Success does not give anyone a license to treat people badly. Also, every day I realize that this world is much smaller than people think.

What goes around comes around. People think of it as karma, and Benny shares an experience about it in his book. I tend to agree that you need to put out into this world what you are expecting to get back.

This one is harder. I’ve been there with big ones and even the daily fails you endure in your life. When something really fails, it can be very difficult to get yourself out of that swamp. You replay decisions. You think about what you should have done differently. You start questioning things that have nothing to do with the original failure. The worst one is when you start to doubt yourself.

The lesson for me is not to pretend it didn’t happen.

Learn from it.

Understand why it happened.

Take responsibility for whatever was yours.

Then move.

Entrepreneurs and venture investors must be optimists at heart. You must believe that things that haven’t been done can be achieved in the future. That something that doesn’t exist could exist, and that the impossible might be solvable. Most important of all, you must believe that you’re capable of being part of that vision and achieving it.

There’s a line I heard many times from partners at Sequoia Capital:

It sounds harsh, but there is something healthy about it too. Yesterday is over. Good or bad, you must keep going. A great deal won’t carry you forever, and a bad one doesn’t define you. What matters is what you do tomorrow, which brings me to the next point in Benny’s book.

This is probably the hardest one for entrepreneurs. There is always another problem on the table. Something always feels urgent. A customer. An investor. Payroll. Product. Competition. Fundraising. A deal. Something you forgot to do.

A good friend recently sent me a post that said: “The most expensive square footage in the world is your brain. Don’t let anyone live free.” I liked that post since we tend to give a lot of free real estate in our heads to problems we cannot solve, conversations that already happened, things people might be thinking about us, and failures we cannot reverse.

Some problems are real and need to be solved. So go ahead and solve those.

For the others, sometimes you must let them go. I know it’s hard sometimes, but that’s when we need to take care of our mental health and help ourselves. For some, it is sleeping more, exercising, walking, spending time with family, meditating, taking a day or week off, or going to therapy, but whatever it is, put it on your calendar. (I still need to revisit this list many times a year.)

There is only one life, so we need to make the best of it and find that state of peace and happiness in our minds as much as we can.

One thing I have always liked about entrepreneurship and venture is that failure can become a badge of honor.

Obviously, not every failure.

If you were dishonest, reckless, or didn’t try everything possible to make it happen, that is a different story, but if you really tried to build something hard, gave it everything, treated everyone correctly, were transparent, and it failed, you should not be ashamed of that.

I do know many cultures still look at failure as something unacceptable. If you come from one of them, it just adds to self-doubt. I think that is completely backwards, and life is too short to care about it. People are too busy with their own problems to really care about yours, and if they are not, they are probably too afraid to try.

Almost every important invention, company, scientific discovery, medicine, career, or idea has failures somewhere behind it.

Probably a lot of them.

The people we eventually call successful are usually just the people whose successes became more visible than all the failures that came before them.

That was my biggest takeaway from Benny’s book:

Failure is going to happen.

Fail.

Learn.

Get back up.

Try again.

You only really fail when you stay down.