Why Risk and Failure Help You Progress

It’s about understanding and weighing them. As you would any decision, business, and this is the thing, this is the thing I can’t help but think about when I think about risk and entrepreneurship or starting a business or a company or whatever, is the worst thing that is going to happen is your company fails. That’s actually not that bad in the grand scheme of things. One of the things I think gets lost in this discussion is the fact that, especially if you’re starting out, like Steve and I were when we started reddit, we didn’t have any dependence, we didn’t have any money, we had nothing to loose. When you don’t have anything then you’ve got nothing to loose. 

The sooner you can get started with that entrepreneurial adventure the better. It will give you fewer and fewer excuses not to. Really, the worst case scenario, if three years into reddit it had failed miserably and Steve and I had said, fine we quit, we are going to go get a job. I can guarantee you, the value of saying, “I ran a company for the last three years,” is going to be much more compelling to a potential employer than, “Oh, I went and got an MBA.” There is no faster way to impress a potential employer than say, “Oh I have been running a company for the past few years." So the way we looked at it, all things considered, this wasn’t anywhere close to the riskiest thing that we could do. We didn’t go running into buildings that were on fire. We were sitting at home on our laptops trying to build the future. When you consider that, then it really comes down to finding the thing that you care about and getting started on it hopefully as soon as you can.