The Founder Institute provides would-be entrepreneurs with the all the right tools to launch their startup. Through the intensive, 4-month program, potential Founders “learn by doing” with structured training courses, practical business-building assignments, and expert feedback.
The Founder Institute program prides itself on the sheer difficulty of the course--fewer than 40% make it through to graduation. High failure rates are not only expected, but welcomed as a measure of the remaining members’ successes. When failure is such a common trajectory of entrepreneurial ventures, discussion on the topic is well worth it.
In a Chicago Tribune article One entrepreneur’s response to failure: Beat it back, quickly, Reva Minkoff, a Chicago Graduate, talks about her personal relationship with failure and how it drives her to succeed.
After losing her job a while back, Minkoff was far from throwing in the towel. More than anything, Minkoff represents the saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”:
I have a very specific reaction to failure, and that is to work my way out of it, which doesn’t always work."
When mentoring her staff about failure, Minkoff likes to keep comments constructive as a means to effectively communicate:
I’ve tried to make sure that everybody knows when something goes wrong, it’s not “It’s your fault.” It’s “We have a setback, now as a team how are going to get through this?”
Switching gears to talk about the still-present issue of sexism in the tech startup environment, Minkoff emphasizes the need to speak up as a woman:
Anytime female founders get out there, it helps. I’ve seen positive change from being more active and vocal. There are lots of women doing this, and we’re taught to be quiet about it because people will judge if they knew were mothers, wives, or girlfriends."
From unemployment to the successful launch of two separate startups, DigitalGroundUp Inc., and Digital4Startups Inc., Minkoff has had opportunities to turn failure into success. By asking herself “What am I going to do about it?” when confronted by failure, she truly embodies a “failing forward” approach to success and to life.
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(Image of businesswoman standing on ladder and drawing on wall image by Shutterstock)
