Perfection Is Usually Impossible

As the regular season has come to an end for college football, I am seeing so many fans disappointed by what could have been. This is not a new phenomenon--every single team has "fair-weather fans," who only seem to stick around if their team is having a good year. The extreme of that is fans that only watch and support a team until they lose in that season.

I am a BYU alumnus and a big-time college football fan. The Cougars just finished the season 10-2, which is one of the best seasons the team has ever had, especially since we are a new admit to the Big XII, where competition is much stiffer than it was as an independent. The special thing about this season is that the Cougs started out 9-0. The perfect season was just around the corner! And then, as most often happens in sports, an unexpected loss (or two) hits, and then "the season is ruined."

Besides being a college football fan of the blue persuasion, I am an entrepreneur. I founded a company in 2016 called Seek. It was a software company in the augmented reality space, and it was recently sold a few months ago. It was not a big exit, and not only that--I would personally consider it a big failure. We built something great, didn't execute perfectly on timing, and the founders, employees, and investors ended up with an outcome about 1/10 of what it should have been.

So was it all not worth it? Maybe--it depends on who you ask?

I have been particularly annoyed at the BYU fans saying that this season was ruined because of just a few yards difference in two games. Last season, in BYU's inaugural season in the Big XII, we went 5-7 and didn't make a bowl game. This year, we are 10-2, still have a great bowl game to look forward to, and we are building for the future! Sure, it would have been nice to go to the conference championship game or the college football playoff--I would love that. Although we didn’t achieve perfection, it shouldn’t overshadow the fact that we had an overwhelmingly fantastic and enjoyable season by nearly every measure.

For the record, I am not a fair-weather fan, and I watch the games all the way through no matter what the score or the record. Why do I do that? Because I love seeing the little wins. I love going down to the individual player levels and seeing their contribution and growth. I love watching the team overcome difficult situations. I love watching the team never give up, all the way down to the last second (which happened a few too many times this season for BYU).

The same is true of entrepreneurship. Roughly 60% of startups never even record a profit. Only 1% raise venture capital funding. So does this mean that those "failures" were a waste of time? Not at all.

Even venture capitalists plan on 30-50% of their portfolio to go all the way to zero. Their gains usually come from outsized wins from 10-20% of their portfolios. Now, if you are an angel investor and you put more than you can afford into an inherently risky startup investment, you may feel an outsized negative impact if that startup goes to zero. But many angel investors these days operate similar to VCs. They put some money in many different vehicles and hope that their overall portfolio allocation ends up increasing over time.

Aside from the financial impacts of a "failed" startup, VCs, entrepreneurs, and all involved with a startup all come away with more experience under their belt. Valuable insights are gained from understanding why a startup goes under. The founders and management team come away with a book worth of learnings that they can apply to other ventures and undertakings in their lives. Along the way, the employees were compensated for their time, and while their stock options might go to zero, they take experience from their time at the company and hopefully use that experience to improve their inputs and outputs in the future.

In the company that I co-founded with Mike Snow and Chris White , we had so many positives through the 8 years that the company existed--also plenty of things that didn't go as planned from which we have been able to learn much. I won't go into all of those things in this article, but a few of them are:

• We closed millions of dollars of contracts with over 100 companies, including some of the largest in the world
• We raised millions of dollars from angel investors, family offices, and VCs
• We employed over 100 people during those 8 years, affecting hundreds of people if you include their families
• We had millions of people use our product to make better buying decisions
• We hired many people that didn't work out for various reasons
• We had to fire perfectly good people because we had to scale back
• We made hundreds of thousands of people move more in the early days of the company when we had a PokemonGO style augmented reality game that made people venture out into the world to find rewards
• We had two major offers to be bought out a few years ago that in hindsight, we should have figured out how to take
• We developed relationships with thousands of people across the technology industry
• We nearly ran out of money 2 dozen times and actually did twice
• We won many startup competitions
• We swung for the fence and struck out a few times with new ideas
• We became one of the top companies in the world in our space
• So much more...

As you can see, in just one startup involving a few founders, hundreds of employees, and dozens of investors, it is sprinkled with wins to be celebrated and losses from which we can learn. The end outcome, partially because it is the most visible (also, recency bias), is where most of the attention lies.

So many college football fans call their team's season this year a failure because "we're just going to a random bowl game" or "the refs ruined it for us." And so many entrepreneurs and their investors dismiss all of the learning that comes from a startup that didn't work out because it didn't end with an oversized check for everyone involved. The reality is that perfection rarely happens. When it does happen, a movie is usually made about it because it is so special! And even within that "perfection," there are countless failures that were overcome to produce a positive outcome.

Perfection isn't bad, nor something that shouldn't be sought after. But we are all hypocrites if we expect perfection from everything in our life. We are all imperfect, without fail--there is only one person who could dodge this description--but I'll leave that lesson for Sunday School in this article. And with imperfect inputs, we cannot be surprised when we get imperfect outputs.

If we choose to live our lives expecting perfection, we will watch our lives go by, disappointed at every turn. If we learn to embrace and celebrate the positives when they come and then internalize the lessons learned from the inevitable imperfection and failures we find mixed into our lives, then we will grow, progress, and be happy.