The secret that shouldn't be a secret: Rinse and Repeat
Or how a restaurant visit in Bucharest the other week reminded me of one of the most important business (and life) lessons I've been lucky to learn 🧴🫧
Happy Sunday!
Last week, as so many other people in my line of work in this region, I spent a few days in Bucharest, where the annual flagship venture conference How To Web takes place every year at around this time. As always, there were too many things going on, both at the conference and at a myriad of meetups and side events. On one of the evenings, I ended up at a wonderful restaurant with a group of Romanian founders and investors, brought together by an American-Romanian entrepreneur who, after several successful ventures in the US, decided to spend more time in his ancestral country and work on some new company ideas there.
At some point, the conversation turned to the topic of business success and how it’s measured. One of the guests said something that brought back thoughts that I have very often had myself: “It’s all rinse-and-repeat, really. You gotta fail a lot before you inevitably become great at something”.
It’s such a simple thought. And it’s called out a lot in the startup and venture world: failing fast, failing often. However, I’ve always felt that most people don’t understand what it really means. It’s not about spectacular failure, which you then carry as a badge of honor. Neither is it about spectacular success. It’s rather much more about small iterations, redoing things nonstop, and not giving up till you reach some kind of reward. Which in business is usually breakeven or profitability. Rinse-and-repeat is really a great metaphor for this.
I don’t know if it’s just the venture industry, but it seems like everywhere and all the time we celebrate success. In business media, all talk is about the size of M&A transactions and funding rounds, or market shares and capitalizations of companies. Looking around, it seems like there’s an award for almost anything. I have always felt uneasy when I’m called out to share my “success story”. You know, I just kept chipping away at it, until we got where we are now. But we’ll keep chipping away even more after this, and hopefully it will get us to new heights in the future.
Success is never definitive, just like failure isn’t. It’s just steps in the process. Rinsing and repeating is a great way to think about it, because the original wording of Wash, Rinse, Repeat comes from old American shampoo packaging. The idea was that if your hair is too greasy, you just wash it a second time with the same shampoo to get it clean.
Imagine if in business, when someone shares the story of a failed product or company, it would just figuratively mean that their hair was too greasy for only one wash. Rinse and repeat. Same for success stories: you just rinsed and repeated until you got your head clean. Now continue rinsing and repeating to get it even cleaner, i.e. bigger and better business results :)
Thinking back at my 15 years in business, there were a lot of moments that at the time felt like huge breakthroughs, or huge, shattering disappointments. But through the mist of time, however, they don’t look so dramatic. They were just intermediate results of just another wash. What’s really important, and very obvious from where I am today, is that I just kept washing, whatever the result was.
I guess my hope is I’ll continue washing, whatever the result of each wash. Life works in a funny and beautiful way like that: sometimes, you need to drive all the way from Sofia to Bucharest, to go to a dinner with someone you’ve never met before, just to realize that.