In most of life, failure is something to be avoided, hidden, apologised for. In innovation it is the opposite: failure is in the DNA. The people, companies and countries that win at building new things are not the ones that fail less — they are the ones that fail faster, learn, and go again. Fail fast, repeat. That is the mantra of innovation that works. It is the whole discipline.
Most ideas won’t work — and that is the point
Backing new ventures is a numbers game, and most of the bets miss. That is not a flaw in the model; it is the model. Innovation is a search for things that do not yet exist, and a search has misses. Research and development is about finding what doesn’t work and moving on. The skill is not avoiding misses — that is impossible — but telling the misses from the hits early, so that precious resources are not wasted on ideas that are going nowhere.
The expensive failure is the slow one
The costly failure is not the venture that dies inside a year. It is the one that takes three or four years to die — soaking up capital, attention and a founder’s best years, long after the evidence stopped supporting it, because nobody wanted to make the call. Decide early. The founders I have backed most successfully are the ones who agreed at the outset on what traction would look like, and on exactly what we would do if it did not appear.
Speed is not recklessness. A fast failure handled badly still burns founders and investors; a fast failure handled well sets everyone free to try again.
Fail fast, but fail well
“Fail fast” is only half the instruction. The other half is fail well. A disciplined, well-governed wind-up — obligations met, records clean, staff treated properly, lessons captured — protects the founder from the trauma of a drawn-out collapse, spares creditors and staff from going unpaid, limits the losses to investors, and frees the talent and the capital to try again. Closing a company well is not a failure to be hidden. It is a professional act, and it is the difference between a founder who is destroyed by a setback and one who is ready to go again quickly.
Failure is a credential
Here is the part our culture gets exactly backwards. The founder who has failed before, cleanly, is very often the best bet the next time. They have learned things no pitch deck can teach — how to read an early warning, when to hold and when to fold, how to look after the people around them when it gets hard. Second-time founders are among the best founders. If we punish the first failure, we never get to back the wiser second attempt.
Build failure into the system
This is where capital and policy meet. If we accept that failure is inherent, we design for it rather than pretending it away. Back many. Decide fast. Wind up the ones that will not work, promptly and professionally. Recycle the capital and the people into the next attempt. That is smart government support and private discipline working together, and it is exactly the model we have built and shown to work — agnostic to the technology, with the returns coming from the portfolio rather than any single bet.
Why it matters
A culture that punishes failure gets less of everything — fewer attempts, fewer second-time founders, fewer companies that matter. A culture that treats failure as a lesson and moves on quickly gets Shenzhen speed without the fear. Australia does not have a talent problem. It has a permission problem — permission to have a go, to get it wrong, and to try again.
Fail fast. Fail well. Repeat. That is not a slogan of defeat. It is how innovation becomes a new industry and builds a dynamic economy.
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