The Privilege of Failure

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My NoSmalltalk session with Jay Shah

by Albert Schiller

A Luxury Good

A dangerous but seductive story is being sold in the modern marketplace of ideas: the celebration of failure. It is a philosophy packaged in charismatic keynotes and slick, shareable content. This narrative reframes bankruptcy as a badge of honor and a mandatory rite of passage for the aspiring innovator. This story, imported uncritically from the venture-saturated ecosystems of the West, is not a universal truth. It is a product, a luxury good. It is a dangerous piece of ideological software that runs perfectly on the hardware of generational wealth and abundant capital. However, it crashes catastrophically when installed on a system with no safety net. For most of the world’s entrepreneurs, celebrating failure is an unaffordable and reckless proposition. It is a lie that ignores the brutal physics of consequence, a convenient buzz that serves the privileged by masking the tremendous class divide in the very definition of risk.

The Valley of Death

The mantra to "fail fast, fail forward" did not emerge from a philosophical treatise on resilience. It is a term sheet philosophy, a doctrine born from the cold, rational mechanics of a venture capital portfolio. In a world where a fund makes dozens of high-risk bets, the expectation is that the vast majority will yield zero. From the investor’s perspective, a startup is a statistical unit in a diversified spreadsheet. A quick failure is not a tragedy but a cheap, efficient outcome. It allows capital to be cut from a dying project and reallocated to the next bet with minimal friction. This doctrine is a system feature that treats money and founders as infinitely renewable, not human resources. It is a strategy for those who play chess with other people’s money, pawns, where the personal cost of any failure is negligible. It is the language of an ecosystem that has institutionalized second, third, and fourth chances, a safety net woven from capital, connections, and a culture that insulates its chosen players from the permanent consequences of a failed venture.

The Billionaire’s Party

Jay Shah offers a sharp, unsentimental deconstruction with a single, devastating image: for a rich man, failure is a party. When a venture backed by immense personal or family wealth collapses, the event is not one of shame but a networking opportunity. The founder calls their peers, not to mourn, but to perform a specific ritual of the elite. The "failure party" is a social transaction. It is a story traded over expensive drinks, a public demonstration of one’s participation in the high-stakes game. The financial loss is a rounding error, an educational expense. The failure itself becomes a social asset, a testament to one's courage that paradoxically increases their credibility for the next round of funding. This, for Shah, is the ultimate privilege: the ability to rebrand a catastrophic loss as a valuable data point. When survival is never questioned, failure does not threaten one's existence. It is entering the Colosseum as a spectator, not a gladiator.

The Ruined 90%

For the majority of entrepreneurs operating outside this bubble of privilege, there is no party. There is only the cold, silent accounting of the consequences. Failure is not a lesson or LinkedIn carousel for the middle-class founder in India who has secured a twenty lakh loan from a bank, leveraging their family’s savings and their own future. It is a life sentence. It is the relentless, daily pressure of a debt that cannot be wished away. It is the present but often unspoken shame of explaining the loss to a family that invested not just money, but their belief, their trust in you. It is the social stigma in a culture where financial collapse is not seen as a stepping stone, but as a final judgment, a gravestone. Failure is not a narrative device for this person in a long career. It is the end of that career, their identity. The doors do not magically open for the next venture. They close. This is not a "learning experience." It is the disintegration of a life’s work and a future’s possibility.

An Honest Account

To reject the celebration of failure is not an act of fear or pessimism. It is an act of respect for the brutal reality of the entrepreneurial journey in India. Shah’s philosophy is a necessary antidote to the ...toxic positivity that fuels the startup industry. It calls for an honest and unsentimental accounting of risk, stripped of the narratives imported from abroad. True courage is not found in a casual, flippant willingness to fail. It is found in a sober, clear-eyed understanding of the devastating, real-world cost of failure, and the decision to proceed anyway, with the seriousness and diligence that such high stakes demand. The entrepreneur who is "shit scared of failure" is not a coward. They are realists, never carried by the safe wings of privilege. They are the ones who understand the true weight of their ambition. It is time to stop celebrating an abstract, consequence-free version of failure and start respecting the entrepreneurs who operate in the real world, where the stakes are everything.

5 Lessons with practical values-

Open Questions

1. Does the "fail fast" mantra celebrated in your professional circles honestly reflect the economic reality of the people in the room, or is it a performance of a privileged, imported ideology?

2. How would your strategic decisions change if you stopped treating failure as a celebrated learning opportunity and started treating it with the clinical respect of a potentially catastrophic, life-altering outcome?