Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan, the saying goes. But if you watched or listened to the media commentary surrounding the recent collapse of Unfiltered, the business founded by Jake Millar, whose backers included some notable figures with triumphs and disasters of their own, you'd be forgiven for thinking that failure was a prime source of entertainment among those who should know better.
Most everyone who has had any success in any sphere of public life, if they are honest and possess even an iota of humility, will tell you that failure has been their greatest teacher; a necessary ingredient in their ultimate success.
What if Richie McCaw had come off that Cardiff pitch in 2007, the graveyard of his dreams and a nation's expectations, and taken all the criticism – which was relentless for weeks, if not four entire years – to heart? What if he'd quit? To his credit, he had enough faith in himself to lead his team to back-to-back World Cup victories, confirm his place as the GOAT, and shut his detractors up forever – but our young entrepreneurs, facing the same kind of opprobrium and vitriol, may not be able to summon the same resilience, and we will all be poorer for it.
The business world is no different. Take Y Combinator, one of the most prestigious incubators in the United States. Thousands of entrepreneurs compete to get into the programme, which has a staggeringly low acceptance rate of about 1.5 per cent (even Harvard's rate is three times higher). You could be forgiven for thinking that having been subject to such intensive evaluation, accepted businesses would have a strong chance of success, but evidence shows the failure rate of businesses in the programme is above 90 per cent. Think about that: Of 10,000 start-ups applying, only 150 get accepted, and of those just 10 become successful. Creating a business from scratch is harder than it looks. Even conventional businesses have failure rates of over 90 per cent.