Silicon Valley investors are widely understood to prefer a founder whose first company failed to one who has never started a company. The failure is priced as an asset. Whatever else it produced, it produced someone who has already made the mistakes.
The failure résumé
A minor American genre: the list of rejections, failed ventures and abandoned projects, published deliberately. It only works as a gesture in a culture that reads a record of failures as evidence of attempts.
A/B testing
Show half your users one version, half the other, and let the numbers decide. No argument, no theory, no meeting. The disagreement is resolved by running both and reading the result.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Used in American business to end a discussion — specifically, a discussion about whether something is ready. The sentence casts perfectionism as an adversary, and the good-enough version as the thing under attack.
If at first you don’t succeed
Taught to American children as a rhyme, before they can evaluate whether it is true. Try, try again. The instruction is not to think harder. It is to go again.
Trial and error
The method has a name in English, and the name contains the error as a component rather than a defect. Not trial and success. The errors are half the procedure.
Back to the drawing board
Said cheerfully. The phrase concedes that the attempt failed and moves immediately to the next one, in the same breath. There is no stage in between for assigning blame.
Prototype
American design practice builds rough physical versions early, specifically in order to find out what is wrong with them. The prototype is not a draft of the product. It is an instrument for generating objections.
Pivot
Startup vocabulary for abandoning your original idea and redirecting the company. It is not a word of failure — founders announce pivots. The term borrows from basketball, where the pivot foot stays planted while everything else turns.
Beta
American software ships in beta and says so. Gmail carried the label for years while being used by millions. The product is released unfinished, on purpose, with the unfinishedness advertised.