Here's the cache in case my blog goes down:<p>------<p>Why is this news?<p>Well, it's not supposed to be. News is when so-and-so raised a $15 million round from Sequoia-this or Andreessen-that.<p>Yesterday, we had an interview with Y-Combinator for our video startup, <a href="http://giveit100.com" rel="nofollow">http://giveit100.com</a>. We just had a pretty good launch earlier in the week. My co-founder Finbarr is more reserved than I am - he doesn't like to count his chickens before they hatch. But me, I had practically made myself a chicken sandwich. We'd get in for sure!<p>A little embarrassing to admit, but I'd already started writing my self-congratulatory Facebook status in my head. "So excited to announce that 100 has been accepted into the next batch of Y-Combinator," I'd say.<p>Then at 8pm: we got our rejection email.<p>Ugh.<p>Here's the Facebook status that went out instead:
-------<p>So excited to announce that we had our YC interview today and
...didn't get in.<p>You only hear about people when they succeed huh? I'm way guilty of this too. Only posting the good news on Facebook. Painting an artificially glossy version of my life.<p>But I better start practicing what I preach. Show my mistakes. Don't be ashamed of failure. Be proud I tried my hardest. Fall 7 times, get up 8.<p>YC gave us some good, actionable feedback in their rejection email. They even challenged us to prove them wrong. I appreciate that.<p>Challenge accepted.<p>----------<p>Then a cool thing started happening. One by one, people left comments about how they'd failed before.
Joel Gascoigne from Buffer wrote how they didn't get into YC - they didn't even get an interview. People told me about other YC founders who didn't get in on their first try. Drew Houston from Dropbox is one of them.<p>Overall, Silicon Valley is pretty good about embracing failure. Here, it's not taboo to say you started a business and it failed. I don't know anywhere else like that.<p>But that's easy to forget when we see shiny headlines on TechCrunch. We're only seeing a brief moment of glory. We don't see the self doubt, the lost sleep. The dozens - sometimes hundreds - of rejections from investors.<p>We're good at embracing failure - but we could be better. Do the scarier thing. When we stop hiding our failure, we stop fearing it.<p>"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."<p>- Stephen McCranie