"You have to risk failure to succeed. The important thing is not to make one single mistake that will jeopardize the future"
About this Quote
An Wang’s line reads like a dare and a warning delivered in the same breath. “Risk failure to succeed” is the entrepreneurial creed, the slogan you put on a poster. Then he tightens the vise: don’t make “one single mistake” that compromises tomorrow. The tension is the point. Wang isn’t romanticizing risk; he’s trying to domesticate it.
As a businessman who built Wang Laboratories into a computing powerhouse and later watched it buckle under shifting technology and market forces, he understood two truths that don’t sit comfortably together. First, innovation demands bets: new products, new markets, bold timing. Second, in business, certain failures aren’t educational; they’re fatal. There are “normal” misses you can recover from and “jeopardize the future” mistakes you can’t: overleveraging, betting the company on a single platform, missing a platform shift, ignoring the customer while protecting legacy margins.
The subtext is a worldview shaped by high-stakes engineering and capital-intensive growth: take swings, but design your swings so you survive the strikeouts. It’s less Silicon Valley’s “fail fast” than a pre-digital, hardware-era pragmatism where a wrong inventory cycle or a strategic misread could cascade into layoffs and collapse.
What makes the quote work is its refusal to flatter. It frames success not as fearless bravado but as disciplined risk management: experiment aggressively, protect the runway, and never confuse courage with carelessness.
As a businessman who built Wang Laboratories into a computing powerhouse and later watched it buckle under shifting technology and market forces, he understood two truths that don’t sit comfortably together. First, innovation demands bets: new products, new markets, bold timing. Second, in business, certain failures aren’t educational; they’re fatal. There are “normal” misses you can recover from and “jeopardize the future” mistakes you can’t: overleveraging, betting the company on a single platform, missing a platform shift, ignoring the customer while protecting legacy margins.
The subtext is a worldview shaped by high-stakes engineering and capital-intensive growth: take swings, but design your swings so you survive the strikeouts. It’s less Silicon Valley’s “fail fast” than a pre-digital, hardware-era pragmatism where a wrong inventory cycle or a strategic misread could cascade into layoffs and collapse.
What makes the quote work is its refusal to flatter. It frames success not as fearless bravado but as disciplined risk management: experiment aggressively, protect the runway, and never confuse courage with carelessness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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