Holmes was characteristically vague about who “they” were, but from the context, it seems likely that the naysayers were the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. So really she wasn’t saying that Theranos’s fictional tech was going to change the world; she was expecting the world to make Theranos’s fictional tech real. Not that Theranos would be vindicated, but that the regulatory environment would have to warp to accommodate Theranos’s way of doing business. She was blaming regulatory oversight for what that regulatory oversight found, for the FDA’s craven insistence that technology should do what you claimed it did and that people should not be told they have diseases they don’t actually have.
Her hope wasn’t as crazy as it may sound; this was, after all, how it had worked in many other fields. Tech hasn’t so much changed the rules as it has captured the norms by which the field is governed. And “disruption” probably refers to this disruption of our judgments and categories as well. But only the disrupter has this privilege. Anytime disruptees suggest that they might like to have the world adjusted to ensure their survival, they’re told this is a sign of their weakness and resistance to change. This double standard applies to another Silicon Valley mantra as well: Do you want to “fail better” and “fail fast”? Well, whether you get to, and how your failure is interpreted, depends a great deal on who you are.
.7.Failure
Silicon Valley thinks it has failure figured out. A tolerance for things not going quite right is baked into the tech industry—its love of dropouts being Exhibit A. This can be inspiring to see, but it can also be frustrating. People take jobs and lose them, then go on to new jobs; people create products no one likes, then go on to create other products—that’s refreshing. People back companies that get investigated by the SEC, then go on to back other companies; they can even lie on behalf of a company like Theranos without much of a taint—that’s perhaps less refreshing. In Silicon Valley, it seems, there is no such thing as negative experience.
In an industry where, at least when you are funded by venture capital, you live, die, and are reborn by the J curve, failure is indeed the norm. But if both the high frequency and ultimate irrelevance of failure are inherent in the way money behaves in Silicon Valley, comfort with this idea seems to have received an additional boost in the twenty-first century: after the chastening of the dot-com bust, after the same press that had credulously accompanied tech’s seemingly irresistible rise suddenly spun equally credulous tales of its decline, the tech industry made failure front and center of its resurgence.
In 2008, Cassandra (Cass) Phillipps, who started out in theater and event planning, founded FailCon. She came up with the event while working at a startup that was on the glide path to failure, frustrated that there wasn’t a way to talk about what was happening to her and her coworkers. FailCon was born as a place to do just that. It was and was not strange in its timing: in 2008, failure was everywhere: mortgages and loans failed, then the companies extending those mortgages and loans, then the companies insuring those mortgages and loans; “too big to fail” was in every newscast. But failure didn’t have this kind of ubiquity in Silicon Valley, and when it did occur, the panicked capital pouring in from all around the globe was there to soften the blow and let you try again.
Still, as Phillipps found, her event hit a nerve: Yes, there was hate mail, accusing her of damaging the industry’s recently reacquired shine. But, she says today, there was “something in the zeitgeist that made storytelling about failure important and attractive.” Tech was in the middle of a big boom; Silicon Valley seemed like the one outlier in an all-encompassing economic crisis, and yet there was finally a readiness to “start talking about how hard this is.” FailCon was only one such event. There was also FailFair. There were the Fuckup Nights, which were basically open mics about failure.
Perhaps no cliché encapsulates this particular relationship to failure better than the ubiquitous mantra to “fail better” next time. Even by the standards of the concepts, ideas, and buzzwords explored in the preceding chapters, the route “fail better” has taken into d.school seminars and all-hands meetings is vertiginous. It is also immensely instructive. It will not surprise you to learn that the way “fail better” is commonly used misunderstands its source material. But the way it misunderstands its source material, and the ways in which that source material seems to offer itself up for misunderstanding in just the way Silicon Valley chooses to interpret it, makes it an appropriate final look at what tech calls thinking.
The phrase “fail better” comes from one of the more recent texts I consider in this book. Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), the last great Irish modernist, wrote “Worstward Ho,” one of his final novellas, in 1983. The title is a play on “Westward ho!,” an old phrase that was used as the title of an 1855 novel about a New World expedition, and that came to stand for the European spirit of expansion. “Worstward Ho” is a parody of this spirit. Like most of Beckett’s work, it’s a meditation on misunderstanding, failure, resignation. The prose has a cadence that lulls you in. Where the
