Issue #12 · September 5th 2026
I write about the things that don’t change in a world that won’t stop changing.
I believe adding real value is what gives us purpose, keeps us happy and improves our lives.
In most professional environments, failure is treated as a disqualifier. A gap in the CV that needs explaining. A venture that didn’t work out described in careful language designed to minimise the damage. A chapter people skip over in interviews and hope nobody asks about directly.
We have built systems such as hiring processes, investor due diligence, social perception, etc… that treat failure as evidence of inadequacy rather than evidence of attempt. That distinction matters more than most people realise.
What the stigma costs
The stigma has a price that is rarely calculated because it shows up in things that never happened.
I believe it keeps people from starting things that might not work. From taking roles that carry real risk. From shutting down companies that should be shut down earlier, because the founder is more afraid of what closing looks like than of the continued damage of staying open. It keeps professionals inside safe trajectories when a riskier path might have opened something neither they nor anyone else could have anticipated.
Every person who didn’t start something because they were afraid of what failure would look like on paper is a cost the system pays silently. We never see what wasn’t built. We never count what wasn’t tried. The stigma is invisible precisely because its victims are invisible too.
“We never see what wasn’t built. We never count what wasn’t tried.”
What failure actually is
Failure is painful. That part doesn’t need romanticising. It costs time, money, relationships, and sometimes identity. The people who describe it as a gift have usually had enough distance from it to forget what it felt like in the middle.
But it is also the most efficient feedback mechanism available. It tells you things about yourself, about markets, about people, about your own judgment that no success ever could. Success confirms what you already believed. Failure revises it. Sometimes gently, sometimes completely, but always with a specificity that no course, no mentor, and no book can replicate.
The person who has failed at something real and absorbed the consequences is operating with a calibration that cannot be faked and cannot be shortcut. They know which risks are real and which ones only look scary from the outside. They know what they are actually made of when things go wrong. That knowledge changes how they operate in ways that are immediately visible to anyone who has been through the same thing.
The cultural gap
Some environments have internalised this. In the US startup ecosystem a failed venture is treated as a credential. Proof that someone has played at a level where failure is possible, that they have skin in the game in the most literal sense, and that they are now operating with information that only comes from having lost something real.
Most European professional environments have not reached this point. The person who tried something and lost is still viewed with more suspicion than the person who never tried at all. The safe career is still the legible one. The gap year, the failed startup, the pivot, the shutdown — these require explanation in a way that a straight line from university to corporate never does.
That asymmetry is irrational. The straight line tells you almost nothing about how someone operates under pressure, makes decisions with incomplete information, or recovers from setbacks. The failure tells you almost everything.
“The straight line tells you almost nothing. The failure tells you almost everything.”
What should change
Failure on a CV should signal something positive. This person attempted something real. They absorbed the consequences. They are now operating with information they could not have gained any other way.
The question worth asking is not “why did it fail” as an accusation designed to find the flaw. It is “what did you learn and how has it changed how you operate.” Those are different conversations. One is looking for a reason to filter someone out. The other is trying to understand what they are actually carrying.
The organisations and investors and systems that learn to ask the second question will consistently access better people than the ones still asking the first. Not because failed founders are universally better, but because the willingness to filter by attempt rather than by outcome attracts a different kind of person entirely. One who is willing to try things that might not work. Which is the only kind of person who ever builds anything that matters.
The invariant
The people who have failed and kept going carry something that cannot be taught and cannot be faked. A tolerance for uncertainty that is grounded in experience rather than theory. A calibrated sense of what actually matters when everything is on the line. A relationship with risk that has been tested rather than merely imagined.
That is not a liability. It is one of the most valuable things a person can bring into a room.
The systems that recognise it will get better people, better decisions, and better outcomes. The ones that don’t will keep filtering out exactly the people they need most, and never quite understand why the safe choices keep producing ordinary results.
Fernando Martín is Managing Director of NEXMO Movement Data Hub (UC3M), Venture Builder at MOVEN, and founder of Eccocar. He writes here about venture building, AI agent operations, and the European technology landscape.
The Invariance — by Fernando Martín In a constantly evolving world, only value is the invariance that holds everything together.
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