Failure, loss, and learning.

Joyce and I have reflected a lot in the last fortnight.

Among other things, I recall this line a month ago from yishimcgee:

I feel like I failed… I feel no relief.

I wish I could speed the assuaging of her pain… but I cannot. Relief from the feeling of failure — especially when it accompanies loss of someone or something you love — comes only with the passage of time. That’s been my experience.

So today as Joyce, Kenneth, and I pulled two dozen boxes to the point of physical exhaustion, I found comfort in this passage Joyce sent me from Will Wright in the New York Times:

When I’m managing creative people, the way they relate to failure is very important. Because there are certain types of failure that you really want to celebrate. I personally learned a lot more from my failures than from my successes. And if you look at it that way, then all my failures, you know, in some sense brought me to my larger successes, because I recognized why I failed, and I learned from it. And so, at that point, you can even argue that it’s not a failure. It’s part of your learning process.

And so, even with interns, it’s kind of interesting to see how they relate to failure. Does it motivate them, do they go a different direction, do they give up or do they learn from it and get some insight and add it as part of their tool chest? In some sense it is an award that they’ve earned.

One of the questions I will usually ask somebody when I am interviewing them is, what was your biggest failure? And what did you learn from it and what would you have done differently? Within a team setting, a lot of times we’ll go down paths and we’ll prototype things. And at some point we’ll realize it was a bad branch and we have to back up and go take a different branch. Those forays — as a team, we can celebrate those.

Joyce and I have lost a lot of people recently. Billy and Rajeev, to name two.

How am I coping? Mainly through physical exercise and recalling 90-year-old wisdom:

No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

I used to sweat every little detail about every little thing. Now I find myself regularly asking, “In five years, will this matter?“

I used to packrat things from every era of my life. Now I’ve started to throw things away. I’m struck by a feeling that until I let go of some things, I have no room to grow. So I look to get rid of anything that isn’t joyful, useful, or beautiful.

I think that’s part of how I’ll get myself back to the right state of mind so I can have the vision to see opportunities again. As Richard the Wise Man once said,

Being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind.

Richard Wiseman says that only about 10% of life is purely random; the remaining 90% is defined by the way we think. Our attitudes produce our luck.

Failure happens. Think of Thomas Edison, who tried thousands of filaments while failing to make a working long-lasting light bulb, “I never failed. I simply discovered 10,000 ways not to do it!”

So yes, unexpected death and feelings of failure happen regularly. They are an inescapable part of this world.

It’s hard to lose people and things. It takes time to internalize what happened and integrate it all as part of ourselves.

I will remember to breathe, and I will remind myself to be patient because healing takes time.

And remember to get outside every day. Because miracles are waiting everywhere.

Thank you, Rajeev Motwani.

On Friday I learned from Manish and Naval that Rajeev Motwani had died.

Rajeev and Asha invested in Joyce’s and my company Renkoo four years ago, and it really was the case that his friendship and his time were the most valuable aspects of that investment. Over the years, he has been a great advisor, confidant, and friend.

We would meet regularly at the University Coffee Cafe in Palo Alto. Every time I talked with him, he made my ideas better — on both technical matters and human matters. On the former, he always asked about algorithms we were developing so that he could suggest ways to improve them; on the latter, he regularly reminded me to be patient so that I could improve myself.

Over the years I’ve gotten myself into many sticky situations, and Rajeev was always Socratic, calmly advising me and Joyce to be all we can be, and reminding us to believe in ourselves the way he believed in us.

My favorite story about Rajeev is when the going got tough for Renkoo, and we gave every investor an opportunity to exit, his words to me were assured and confident. “Why would I want to leave you?” he asked. “You’re just getting started.” When I pointed out that other people did want out, he seemed peeved but resolved that everyone reacts differently to difficult situations, and that he was not going anywhere. Great things happen as the result of struggle and experience, and the longer we toil, the more experienced we become.

I never wanted to bother him, but he regularly checked in with me, and frankly I don’t know where he found the time. I know he was busy with a million other things, but he always made time for me. In fact, my next call with him was supposed to be today.

I spent a lot of this weekend shocked and sad. I still can’t believe he’s gone. As I read peoples’ thoughts about him — among them Om, David, Ron Conway, and Sergey — one thing really came across: Rajeev Motwani was a kind man. Rajeev gave so much strength and wisdom to so many people that his legacy lives on in all the people we touch and all the work we do.

And that is the greatest compliment I can bestow on anyone. I will truly miss you, Rajeev. Thank you.

Get yourself a giant panda!

In pondering a New Year Resolution for 2009, Troutgirl quoted Anne Lamott’s Hard Laughter to me…

I said that I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life’s work, and try to get hold of a giant panda. If you had a giant panda in your back yard, anything could go wrong — someone could die, or stop loving you, or you could get sick — and if you could look outside and see this adorable, ridiculous, boffo panda, you’d start to laugh; you’d be so filled with thankfulness and amusement that everything would be O.K. again.

Ten 2009 Predictions!

I’m not as analytical as John Battelle ‘09, so my predictions have no justification.

Also, I have a caveat: whereas most peoples’ predictions come out of their brains, mine will come from another body part that shall remain nameless.

So take these predictions without ado and with a pound of salt:

1. Google will buy AOL, and rename the Chrome browser “Netscape”. Or AOL will announce its intention to go public, and Google will take a loss on its 5% stake.
2. YouTube will account for a third of all Google searches in 2009. For that alone, they were totally worth the acquisition price.
3. Apple will buy Adobe, and make CS4 available for $149 (or “one fitty” in 50-Cent-speak). This is not so much a prediction as wishful thinking on my part.
4. The Founders Fund, seeing billions of dollars available from The Fed at nearly zero percent interest, will start a new bank startup. Now seems like an excellent time to start a bank.
5. eBay will be bought out by a private equity fund with too much cash on its hands and nothing to do with it. eBay will then be cut up and sold to different companies. Paypal will be fought over by Google, Facebook, and in an interesting twist, the bank startup from The Founders Fund.
6. Sun will buy itself private with cash on hand. Or get bought by someone everyone rolls their eyes about.
7. Yahoo will appoint one of its Board members to be its new CEO, and it will shut down and/or divest some properties. It will sell HotJobs and spin out Flickr. We wish.
8. Microsoft will once again do nothing of any particular note, and still make billions of dollars doing it. They will continue to do nothing productive with their Facebook investment. Internally, there will be wars waged among a new faction of Microsoftees who want to develop and sell “Microsoft Linux”, to compete with the loyalists working on Windows 7. Oh, and they’ll once again change the names of their web email and their web search sites. Whoopee!!
9. No one will be able to stop talking about Twitter thanks to celebrities and politicians using the service and being unable to shut up about it.
10. Be the Change will employ the Internets to get a million people to sign the Service Nation Declaration of Service, and rally everyone from Oprah to Ashton Kutcher to pass the Serve America Act into law. Who knows, maybe Oprah and Ashton will even use Twitter to promote service.

If you’re gonna dream, dream big.

It was, is, and will be the economy, stupid!

Favorite post of 2007:

Historical Financial Charts — Are You Invested In These Markets?

Favorite post of 2008:

Agency Costs and the Financial Crisis

Good times.

Blog Action Day: Poverty!

Today is Blog Action Day: Poverty. You can register here.

The main thing I want to say about poverty is that I’m disappointed that poverty has left the discourse now that John Edwards is no longer actively campaigning. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain has said much about poverty, and I’m guessing it’s because it’s not a topic that will help them win the election in a few weeks. That makes me a sad panda. You can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its poorest people. They aren’t represented much in our Congress because the poor cannot afford lobbyists. More than forty years ago Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, and we still struggle today. We can end poverty in America and in the world if we have the will. When we do so, America and the world will be much better off.

At least Barack Obama inspires people. John McCain seems like more of a placeholder than an inspirer. Perhaps, if elected, Barack will take up the issue of poverty. He does seem to care more about what poor people go through. But George W. Bush has left him a lot of other messes to clean up as well. So we’ll see.

Pandas as proof of intelligent design!

Discover Magazine says,

The panda’s survival proves the existence of God. How is it, they ask, that such a species could have “evolved” to be so poorly suited for survival and could have lasted these “alleged” tens of thousands of years without a little help from a higher power?

…

So it’s true: Pandas did not evolve… in zoos. They evolved to find their own food and seek out their mates in dense bamboo forests after being raised by their real mothers, not by zookeepers. The panda’s weaknesses in today’s world—from its failure to reproduce in captivity to its yawn-inspiring lifestyle—is a product of its natural history, not a malicious joke of an intelligent designer.

Panda love is the sweetest love!

The desire to hug is mutual. Before I die, I want to hug a panda.

Pandas spend 10 hours a day eating!

Whew.

Earthquake Cat!

Luxury Launches: “Some genius mind from Japan have designed a cool survival kit for cats and dogs that includes some basic items that can keep your four legged furry pal alive till the fire brigade gets to them.”

This picture is begging to be LOLcatted.

Lego Fun Snacks!

Penny Arcade: “I would love to know what sick bastard at Kellogs came up with this genius idea. I just spent the first three years of my sons life trying to get him not to eat blocks, and now you’re telling him they taste like fucking strawberries. Thanks a lot assholes. Seriously, how in the hell did this ever get past their legal department. You can’t tell me that this isn’t a lawsuit just waiting to happen. I can only assume that their next product is fruit flavored thumbtacks.”

Panda search engine!

What the world needs now is a panda search engine. Pandoogle, if you will.

Thank you, Victoria.