Why Failure Sucks: A Startup Story

Everyone says failure is good for founders. It's trendy, even cool. Easy to say, unless you're the one failling. Besides, it’s not even true.

- David Whitford

ONE BLUSTERY afternoon in March, I meet Emma Weisberg for coffee near her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, at a diner called Utopia. Weisberg is petite, energetic, and warm, with thick brown hair that falls to her shoulders. Three years ago, she gave up a secure job at Google to go all in with Blinkbuggy. It’s a free online baby book, a digital vault for storing pictures and video of your kids that Weisberg, 38, dreamed up when she became a mother. For a while, Blinkbuggy was her very own utopia. She raised a million dollars, built a beautiful product, won a coveted slot at a big-time startup accelerator, nailed her presentation on demo day, and spent much of last summer in heady conversations with angels and VCs, fully expecting funding for the next stage of Blinkbuggy’s growth.

That’s as far as she got. Everybody loved Blinkbuggy how could they not? It’s cuteness to the nth degree. Several did their due diligence. But in the end, nobody else wrote a check. User growth stalled, revenue never materialized, the money ran out. She had to lay off everybody. Her husband, Liad Spiro, who had ditched his job to manage Blinkbuggy’s finances around the same time Weisberg left hers, returned to salaried work. Now Weisberg’s interviewing. She needs a paycheck. Anything to keep Blinkbuggy alive.

Weisberg’s not giving up. “Maintenance mode” is how she describes Blinkbuggy’s current status. Sometimes she cops to “sort of mid-fail,” which is admirable but doesn’t convey the full, hard truth: Weisberg launched a business into which she poured her heart and soul. And she failed.