Mistakes are part of the job; some of them are still failures

Seed investors know before they sign that most of their companies will stumble badly. Jeff Clavier runs SoftTech VC, one of the funds that write the first checks into young internet companies, and from that seat mistakes are routine. A seed investor expects most companies in a portfolio to struggle and many to fail, and prices each investment on the chance that a few will do very well. When Clavier says mistakes are part of the journey, he is describing the arithmetic of his own business as much as offering encouragement.

The first half of the sentence is the more interesting one. “Of all types and consequences” is a wide net. Founders hire the wrong person, launch in the wrong market, spend too long on a feature nobody uses, raise too little or too much. Some of those mistakes are cheap and quickly corrected. Others cost a year. The line tells founders to expect both and not to treat the first serious error as proof they should quit.

That matters because the emotional cost of a mistake is often larger than its practical cost. A founder who treats every error as a verdict on their ability will start hiding errors, from investors, from the team and from themselves. Hidden mistakes compound. An investor who says in advance that mistakes are normal makes it easier to report them early, when they are still cheap.

The second half needs more care. “The only real failure is not trying” is generous and, taken literally, wrong. Some failures are real whatever the effort behind them. Misleading investors about numbers, cutting corners on customer safety, or spending money that belongs to someone else are failures of a different kind from launching a product nobody wanted. They are not steps on a journey; they end it, and they harm people who trusted the founder.

Investors are not neutral here either. A fund that tells founders mistakes are fine also benefits from founders taking bold risks, since the fund holds many bets and the founder holds one. That does not make the advice wrong, but it is worth knowing whose arithmetic it comes from.

There is also a practical failure the line does not mention: repeating the same mistake. Trying hard and failing in a new way is learning. Failing in the same way three times, because nobody stopped to ask why, is not.

So the useful reading has three parts. Honest mistakes are expected and should be surfaced quickly. Ethical failures are real failures and are never excused by effort. And the value of any mistake depends on whether it changed what happened next.