[MUSIC] So let's talk about the f word. No, this is a PG-13 course, so we'll stay within those parameters. But we'll talk a bit about failure, which is a word that often most of us don't like to hear. But what if we accepted failure as a critical part of the learning process? As a part of the creative process? Think of the first time you ever picked a musical instrument. I remember the very first time that I picked up my guitar, and I thought I was going to sound just like the Edge playing Sunday Bloody Sunday. But I did not, I sucked. But when you learn a musical instrument, you accept failure as a critical part of the learning process. Now what if we applied that very concept on this mindset of entrepreneurialism, if you will? What if you accepted failure, not as something to run away from, but something to be embraced? >> When you've failed, people think about that as a low point. But I think that, you said in music, failure is a known thing, it's part of the way up. And I think it's part of the way up on everything, entrepreneurship, relationships. I think that we have this desire for a going forward look at life. That parents might say, what's your plan? My plan is to go to college, and I'm going to get this degree, and then I'm going to go work in this industry, I'm going to blah, blah, blah. They'd say great, now you've got this forward path. When in reality life doesn't work that way at all, and you end up with a lot of crap that you have to deal with. But I believe that our engine runs on what's wrong. So if you didn't have failure, and you didn't have pain, the freaking engine wouldn't be on. >> From a personal experience, I know when I first started my company, when I went out there looking to raise money from investors I got rejections from just about everyone. But in many ways, that rejection led me down the right path. I ended up starting the company with just my savings, which led me to making a series of decisions that ended up proving what made the company successful in the long-term. So in many ways, failure tends to point you in the direction that you ought to be going in the first place. It tends to unearth and expose the true path that you need to be taking. >> Innovation is generally about creating things that have never been created before. So I've got this very strong principle around here, that we should be failing at least 95% of the time. In large corporations, people are taught that you shouldn't really stick your head above the clouds or else it's going to get lopped off. Because if you fail too many times, people are going to point their finger and say hey, he's not done anything good or she's not done anything good in a long period of time. Whereas in innovation, in a startup company, it's the total opposite. If you fail, you learn, and you adjust, that's success. >> There's some fun analogies too of this process of iteration and failure as one of the only ways to solve important engineering challenges. So there was a lot of talk early on in the days of artificial intelligence of how could we get a machine to really understand how the world works, and to be genuinely intelligent in the world? Well the first really well-known commercial product that came out of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab was a damn vacuum cleaner, a Roomba vacuum cleaner. And they got it to work not by loading it with all the intelligence of what every living room in the world looks like, or where all the dust is on the floor. They gave it a few simple rules. They said, why don't you just go spin around out there, see what happens? And if you hit a leg of furniture, just back up and move in another direction. They taught it enough to know when it was about to go down a flight of steps, and then taught it to back up when it reached that. That was a simple set of iterative rules that could be engineered into a crude machine. Which if that machine works hard enough and long enough, it will act as though it knew what it was doing. Similar to the entrepreneur who we claim he had a plan all along, he knew exactly what the company was going to do. That machine didn't know where the dirt was when it started. But it had enough simple rules of adaptability that it was able to actually get all the dirt up as though it had a plan. In order to create some of the greatest engineering accomplishments that we know, you have to embrace a method of relating to the world in which failure is an option. >> [MUSIC] If you fundamentally shift your attitude about what failure is, and what it means, and the signals that it sends you. Then you tend to look at it as something that's an inevitable part of embarking on a new adventure, which is ultimately what entrepreneurship really means. Rather than it being a big red stop sign that stops us dead in our tracks. [MUSIC]