Startup Funerals

I went for a very interesting event today and its called Startup Funerals. I was surprised at the size of the audience that made it to the event and that stayed all through the event. The event had a very simple format of networking and a few speakers talking about their experiences. The event focused on startups that did not succeed, in other words they failed or they gave up. The idea of the event was to share the learning from these startups with the rest of the community. 

The speakers were a couple of Hyderabad Angels who shared their experiences with the audience but the stand out speaker was K.Ramakrishna who gave a chronological history about his experiences through his entrepreneurial journey and he very openly explained about the reasons why the startups he tried out did not work out. There are not many who are very open like this about their failures. So its wonderful to see people starting to open up and explain what went wrong so that no one else makes the same mistakes.

We all go through ups and downs in startups and its about how you steel your way through these situations and over come them. Its great to see events like this where people come out and explain about these challenges and how they over came them or learnt from them to make bigger and better startups. Unless you try it you will not make a mistake and unless you make a mistake you are not going to learn. We have all made mistakes from when we were toddlers and that is how we have learn.

One question that keeps haunting me is "Why is it that we did not fear to fall down when we tried to first walk as a toddler but fear to try things out as an adult?" Is it because we are more knowledgeable of the risks involved in failing that it restricts us from trying things out?