Ask HN: If my startup fails, what are the impacts on my future career prospects?

I was the CTO of my startup and was a senior architect looking across multiple domains in my previous job. Now, I'm more a specialist, looking at one single thing while it's expected that someone has the responsibility to solve a different problem.

To me, that's the biggest career impact. In our startup, everyone did everything. Need to hotfix something in production in the morning and then head off to a investor pitch in the afternoon? Come back and rework on our marketing message? Yes. Yes and Yes.

Now, I'm just a dev. Not the marketing guy. Not the finance guy. That's someone else's responsibility. Am I being paid less? Not really.. But am I having lesser responsibilities? Definitely. Is that a career downturn or not? I don't know, but I do see others who joined the same company from a more successful startup being "higher up" when it comes to responsibilities and job titles.

In Asian cultures the common expectation for a worker is to be loyal to its company, know its place in the hierarchy and diligently follow the procedures. An independent thinker with many creative ideas and innovation proposals will unlikely to be welcome. Failure at something is generally a point of embarrassment that needs to be covered up or at least not advertised.

In Western cultures independence, experimentation and failure are seen as normal elements of the life process. There have been many inventors and entrepreneurs in the Western history exactly thanks to those liberal perceptions. Failure is not tragedy but useful experience. You learn a valuable lesson that will help avoid mistakes in the future and ultimately achieve success in what you do.

In reality of course it's not as black and white. There are both types of people living in all countries, and many people are somewhere in between on that axis. Also, even among Western countries there are those which are more Western and more adventurous than the rest and some are less Western and more risk-averse. There is the full spectrum out there.

Back to the software industry, I'd say somebody with an experience of failure is way more valuable than a person who never did anything wrong. Humans learn more from failure than from success. If you do something and succeed right away then you'll never know why you succeeded - because you did everything right or just because of the right set of circumstances, fortunate timing and some good luck. Meaning you won't know what components are crucial for success. When you fail you learn what elements are responsible or have contributed to the failure. You may not know yet what ingredients you need to have to succeed but at least you know which obstacles you need to remove to not fail.

In general, experienced people do value failure and can appreciate the usefulness of someone with that kind of background. They should not have any problems hiring that person because they recognize the knowledge that comes with it.

I too have had some failures in my professional life and I'm not ashamed to admit them. Each of them taught me a valuable lesson. On a personal note, I would be more inclined to hire somebody who was bald enough to attempt something big, failed and learned from it than someone who just drifted from one safe employment to the other never actually interacting with the real world in the wild.

TL;DR: Don't worry about it and go for it.