MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - Mark Cranslin, CEO and co-founder of several failed startups, announced to his friends today that his latest venture had also gone belly-up, but that he continues to be optimistic for the future. "Guys, I don't like to think of this as a defeat. I prefer to think of it as successfully spending all of our venture investment. With zero return," said a surprisingly upbeat Cranslin. As the serial failure noted, "a stunning 92 percent of startups fail. 92 percent! We are right up there with a majority of other startups. And really, when is it ever a good thing to be in the minority? Does the president get elected because he won a minority of electoral votes?"
Despite repeated, embarrassing professional defeats, Cranslin remained confident, telling the group that the lessons he learned would stay with him for a lifetime. "The ideas, the knowledge gained, not to mention the friendships and personal connections forged. Those intangibles are far more valuable than the millions in cold, hard cash I could have earned. Am I right?"
Though he wouldn't admit to any single contributing factor to his most recent company's demise, Cranslin did concede that his downfall may have occurred when he took a page out of the Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come," playbook. "Every startup success book I've read stresses the importance of building a killer product above all else, without acknowledging the revenue piece of it. So we didn't think about revenue. Ever." Continuing on the subject of monetizing his business, Cranslin said he was also "inspired by one particular Steve Jobs quote: 'I'm as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.' In our case, revenue was one of those things."
When asked about plans for his next business, Cranslin replied that he will be pivoting his current failure into "new, uncharted territory, ripe for a unicorn-sized success story. Here's our tagline: 'Anvilr, same-day anvil delivery service. By drones.' We just closed a $20 million Series A round at a $300 million valuation."
Note: This is a work of satire.