“When you are creating something no one else has ever done before, making mistakes is a method,” said Carlo Gualandri, Soldo CEO, and one of the “fathers of the Internet” in Italy, during a Fireside Chat at Pi Campus. “I don’t think you can even define what a mistake is unless it is a really big one.”
Talking with former Foglio journalist Eugenio Cau, Gualandri shared some of his lessons learned by starting up companies in markets where the digital revolution was disrupting the status quo. “The process of trial and error – says Gualandri – requires that you make a lot of mistakes. The point is not trying to avoid mistakes, but having a model that allows you to make as many mistakes as you can as early as you can. Because the earlier you make a mistake, the less is the cost in financial, organizational and time terms”.
According to Carlo, “there are no mistakes within a model or even the search for a model that makes every single mistake one step forward in understanding the problem you are trying to solve.” The reason is simple: it’s not a question of failure, but research. “The biggest mistake would be not having a model, a map, an assumption that you wanna try when you do things because in this case you’d pay for mistakes and get nothing back”.
But having a model for mistakes doesn’t mean you are always allowed to fail. Studying the market and researching for best practices is mandatory. “It’s stupid to make an error others have already made. There are a lot of experiences and stories available online and in books and if you make the same errors as others it is because you didn’t do your homework.”
“I made one thousand mistakes – Gualandri says – And I learned something out of each of them. It would be almost nonsensical to think ‘what if I never did…’. Anything that happened after the first, the second, the thousandth error happened because of what the previous mistakes taught me”.
