Failure is a fascinating topic to study.
The question as to why previously successful companies, and successful people for that matter, fail is incredibly insightful.
The reasons companies and people succeed are plentiful. Not least of which is luck.
Failure, however, is usually down to a few consistent few causes.
Should it not be the case that we learn from history? Can we not simply learn to avoid the mistakes that others before us made?
Apparently it is not that simple.
Civilizations fail. Predictably. Companies die by committing the same mistakes, some call them follies, others made before them. Over and over again.
Do people learn from the errors of the past?
Absolutely not!
Everyone swears that "this time is different" and that past mistakes are just that. A thing of the past.
Until they get to that crossroad. And then they do!
If you are at the crossroad, what should you do? It may sound mundane but it is incredibly educational to hang out with industry (and I use that term loosely) veterans and talk to them about their "disaster stories".
Take that big market share scaling plan you have been working on for months. Somebody already tried that back in 2007. Learn from them!
That incredible revenue sharing model that will help you dominate your industry? Somebody had the same idea back in 2011. It crashed and burned the company. Figure out what went wrong.
For every www.amazon.com there are 100 or more www.pets.com.
Turns out that we humans aren't really that bright. We play the same games. Simply using a different technological paint. We are utterly convinced that our idea is not only special but original too! And that simply because it was our big brains that came up with the idea.
In most cases, however, someone else had that very thought years ago.
Better to learn about possible, it should really be probable, failures in advance than experiencing the school of hard knocks.
Remember the lesson your learnt as a child. The stove is hot. And it hurts when you touch it! And just because you did not listen.
Just some thoughts from someone who has been there and done it. More than once. Think 1980s stock market crash. The Asian Financial Crisis. The dotcom boom and bust. The global financial crisis.
To me it seems that memories get shorter and shorter. And that does not only go for investors. Especially central bankers suffer from this malaise. And politicians the world over are the worst offenders.
Just because crypto is fairly new does not mean that the lessons we learnt over the last 30 years or so do not apply.
They very much do.
Be careful out there!
