Everybody is sort of crushing it and everybody is sort of
you know, putting on this brave face
but nobody is really willing to admit that they're suffering and that they don't know what to do.
I think it's just the feeling that you haven't been good enough.
That's something maybe both men and women feel, but definitely women.
Startups are this strange industry where the expectation is failure
and the exception is success.
The default state of a company is to die.
I think the biggest misconception about being an entrepreneur is that it's glamorous.
We've all seen or most of us have seen the social network.
Everybody thinks it's all about sort of black turtlenecks and jeans
In fact, it's a really hard slog.
My name is Jamie Pride
and I’m a serial entrepreneur and Venture capitalist.
I founded a number of business but in 2016 I started a business called Refined.
It was a really fast rise and it was a really fast fall.
The stock price went from I think 20 cents on listing to almost 2 dollars,
in about 14 weeks.
That translates to about 200 million in what's known as market capitalization
and it subsequently had a similar
fall and we had to lay a lot of staff off.
There was a lot of instability in the company and ultimately, you know, I left.
9 out of 10 entrepreneurs fail but you always think you're gonna be the one.
Failure is paramount to success.
Just like sportspeople practice
you know, shooting a basketball and missing 100 shots before they make more shots than they miss.
Hi my name is Niki Scevak and I'm a co-founder of Blackbird.
I invest in startups.
When we look to invest in a company,
I don't think we think of failure as good or bad either way,
more a fact of life.
You look for the people who persevered through the failure, that showed determination.
I actually talk about it a lot.
So if you come to one of my talks,
I actually start telling the women about the shit I did wrong.
All those mistakes, everything that I made was all worth it,
iIn the end.
So don't feel like
you're on your own.
My name is Christie Whitehill, I am a tech entrepreneur and I'm the founder of Tech Ready Women.
My first idea for a tech startup was a dating app called 'Fancied'.
And it was an app that allowed to you to fancy somebody anonymously.
So quite like Tinder.
Oh, there was a lot of things that went wrong.
Some of the mistakes that I made was hiring the wrong development team.
I didn't know the right skill set to hire, cause I knew nothing about tech,
The thing that made it fall down in the end was being out competed by Tinder.
Personally we lost the 50 thousand dollars that we invested in it
and we had the 750 thousand dollar media deal on the table, ready to go.
But I lost all of that.
And it can really take it's toll mentally.
I received a number of death threats.
I had people threatening to hurt my family.
I had people coming to my house.
You know, the c word. Fat c word.
I thought I was ready as a pretty experienced entrepreneur for that kind of failure and I wasn't.
I wasn't physically ready for it and I wasn't mentally or emotionally ready for it.
I really wanted to just sort of end it all
all and you know, didn't really want to go on.
They've often worked long hours and poured their heart and soul into the companies
so it's devastating to find out that not enough customers care about the problem they were solving.
I think people are afraid to discuss failure
because it's such an embarrassing emotion.
It's very hard to look at yourself in the mirror when everyone around you is 'crushing it'
In inverted comas.
The reality is that everyone does it tough.
The media likes to play on the numbers,
so you've raised a million dollars,
you've IPO'd, you're now a billion dollar business.
And some of those things are really unachievable for some people.
I think it's important to really understand what the entrepreneurial journey is like.
There's definitely a stigma associated with talking about failure.
Especially in Australia, where we love somebody on the way up
but on the way down we like to give them a bit of a kicking.
It's not to say that entrepreneurs aren't beyond criticism, because they should be criticised for their mistakes.
That's okay.
But we should also think about you know, the personal impact of that.