Recreating Silicon Valley

amayyasi · Joined: 05 Apr 2011 Posts: 2

I should begin this post by admitting that I have for quite some time been embarrassed that I do not have any impressive failures to my name. Stanford is well known for its connection to Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship. And as we learned from Professor Beyer last night, Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurial culture encourage failure. Only by risking failure can truly innovative companies and products be created. But Stanford also offers its students so many opportunities and resources that it can be easy and comfortable to succeed without taking big risks. This class is one way I hope to take bigger risks, so I salute all our Russian entrepreneurs for taking the risk of starting a new company!

That said, one of my biggest failures came when I was working on a new student magazine at Stanford. I joined as our first ever issue came out, and for the next issue I took on responsibility for putting together one large section of the magazine: a series of articles and interviews on human rights. That section never worked, and due to my own struggles and the struggles of all the editors, our next issue came out months later than we meant to publish it.

Professor Beyer is right that; I learned a lot from the failure and more than I have when the magazine runs smoothly. I had to figure out on the fly how to make a good and efficient pitch for professors to write for my magazine – and learned a lot from when I received unenthusiastic responses from professors. I struggled to get professors and writers to commit to writing articles for us and to stick to deadlines. I became bitterly frustrated with the editor I was working with, who would blow off meetings or say she could deliver when she could not, and learned to negotiate relationships with co-workers I dislike.

My section on human rights never materialized, but I did get two great articles out of the process, and the magazine is now a success. If your curios, it can be viewed online here: http://theclawmagazine.com/.