Dan Gillmor shares the lessons of Bayosphere

I'm a big believer in failure. Some of my most important lessons have come from my failures. I just wish there was a better name for it. I wanted to call this post "Dan Gillmor learns from his failure at Bayosphere," but I knew people would stop at the headline and assume it was a criticism. Quite the contrary. I applaud Dan for providing a detailed, and sincere analysis (via SiliconBeat) of what went wrong with his experiment in "citizen journalism." He doesn't speak in the passive voice either. It's not that mistakes were made, he made mistakes. More importantly, he learned a hell of a lot from the experience, about himself and the incredibly difficult task of building an online community.

Whenever I meet with someone starting a new company, one of the first things I ask them is describe one of their business failures and what they learned from it. When VA Linux was interested in buying Andover.net, I asked VA's President, Larry Augustine, if he had ever failed. He seemed truly confused, and said "Other people thought I would fail, but they were wrong." I couldn't get him to consider the possibility of failure. My reaction was to sell my VA stock the day I was legally allowed. I knew he would have no idea how to handle a downturn.

It's not that failure makes you more timid, which it sometimes can. The benefit of failure is that you enter every new venture recognizing that your plans can go wrong, and hopefully you plan for this possibility. I'm sure Dan's future ventures will be more successful thanks to the lessons he describes in his post.