Entrepreneurs never fail. They may not have achieved what they set out to do, but by virtue of having tried, they made an impact. That is probably the biggest learning I take away from my involvement with the Zell Entrepreneurship Program over the last 15 years, and the tech entrepreneurial ecosystem in Israel for the last 20 years.
If you are not willing to fail, or are too afraid to fail, you never take the risks that reap outsized rewards. You may play it safe, but you don’t win big either. My biggest learning from my own meandering career and the huge privilege I have had being a part of the Zell family is that risk is the key to entrepreneurship, and the defining characteristic of an entrepreneur and a venture, even if the resulting ‘reward‘ sometimes takes the shape of a painful pill.
There is a painful reality inherent to this: you may have to take risks to achieve success, but success is not always the reward for taking risks. The consolation is that there is always some kind of reward.
The reward can be the impact of innovation that will change the world directly, or be carried on by another company and eventually make the mark by another team and in another time. All innovators ultimately build on ‘the shoulders of giants' that came before them.
Or it may be a more personal impact of the experience of facing a setback and having to get up, lick wounds, and keep moving forward. As the program ethos holds, you learn more from the hardships and setbacks than from the easy wins. It is the underlying idea of the ‘learning by doing’ process that is the cornerstone of the program.
Beyond the ethos of the program and because of it, I have noticed over the years that the Zell Program serves as a proxy for the overall Israeli ecosystem on many levels – from the trends in ideation such as consumer apps in the wake of the iPhone distribution channel opportunity (Walyou, Wibiya, Wibbitz, OnO Apps, 24me, and The Gifts Project) to a swing to low-tech after the 2008 financial crisis (Lilu Hair and Funkkit), which ultimately led to many more entrepreneurially minded participants no longer looking at investment banking as an option (IronSource and Overwolf).
And of course, the trend of Israeli domain expertise in commercialized military technology, from cyber to imaging and artificial intelligence (Argus, RealFace, PicScout, and Zebra Medical).
In the first decade of the 2000s, there were exits that often led to the creation of global R&D centers, like The Gifts Project which became eBay's Israel Innovation Center.164 At first, exits tended to be smaller, but as time went on, companies grew and so did exit sizes.165
B2C ventures gave way to B2B (Fairfly, Wibbitz, RealFace, Feex,and Bizzabo), and companies moved to New York to scale rather than Silicon Valley (Bizzabo, Wibbitz, Roomer, and Feex). Certain verticals became hot such as ag-tech (FieldIn and Stay Labs), insurtech and fintech (Hippo, Rewire, Feex, and Parametrix), proptech (Real, Astralink (closed), and Firmus), and mental health (Eleos).
Finally, companies raised and exited in the hype of 2020 (Eleos and Parametrix raised, Adjustico and Spetz exited) or closed as a result of COVID-19 and the economic turbulence it caused (Perceptive.ai, Engie, and Coach.ai).
All of the outcomes are part of the mosaic that is entrepreneurship. It's not to say that failure is a desired result, but the only way to mitigate it completely is to never try in the first place.
To deconstruct the Sam Zell nugget, and the title to this book, it's not that entrepreneurs never fail, they quite often do lose customers, walk away from deals, forego investments, let go of employees, and face a host of other setbacks and even downright Losses. Closing a company, firing employees, and disappointing investors are all hard bullets to bite and cannot be understated enough. But they can also be the no before the yes, the low before the high, or the way we learn to appreciate what is not easily won.
If you don’t try, you cannot ever succeed.And from Gay Hendricks,166 who I quote everytime I have the honor to teach his Zone of Genius methodology in the Zell Program and beyond: “In my life I’ve discovered that if I cling to the notion that something’s not possible, I’m arguing in favor of limitation. And if I argue for my limitations, I get to keep them.”
Entrepreneurs never fail; they have setbacks. We as a society gain from the successes and the setbacks, which are inextricably intertwined catalysts of innovation.
