The five horses struggling to haul the tram up the slope of Jackson Street from Kearny Street had one job to do. But as Andrew Smith Hallidie watched in horror that morning in 1860, their hooves slipped on the cobblestones, damp from summer fog, and they tumbled to their deaths. From that ghastly failure was born, in Hallidie’s mind, the invention that would become the iconic San Francisco cable car.
Our region’s history is rich with entrepreneurial success and creative ventures. Along with accomplishments, however, come failures in many forms: the brilliant idea ahead of its time, the too-clever “concept” restaurant that didn’t make it much past the laughter stage, the disruptive technology that garnered several rounds of funding before going kerplop. For every invention like Levi Strauss’ denim jeans, still going strong in San Francisco after 149 years, there’s a Google Glass version 1.0.
Take the Golden Gate Bridge. The original cantilever-suspension design by engineer Joseph B. Strauss was universally panned as ugly and ungraceful, sending him back to the drawing board. And then there are redesigns nobody asked for. At a 1991 press conference, San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo Jr. unveiled a team helmet with a cartoonish logo more befitting a discount-brand candy wrapper than a national franchise team. It would have made a delightful April Fools’ Day prank, except it was mid-February, and DeBartolo was serious. As was the public outcry. Six days later the plan was abandoned.
In the 1920s, The Dungeon was a short-lived waffle restaurant with a prison theme, complete with waiters in striped convict uniforms, in the basement of an Annie Lane hotel. On July 12, 1920, when things got particularly rowdy, the hotel manager called the police, and the restaurant’s proprietor — or self-styled warden — was arrested for disturbing the peace and taken to the City’s real prison in a life-imitates-artful-restaurant moment before being released on bail. Good times while they lasted.
Olivia Wise
More recently, in 2016, the Millennium Tower was first discovered, to the understandable consternation of its residents, to be sinking and leaning in a San Francisco “I gotta be me” way, as if in creative rebellion against vertical hegemony. It’s worth recalling that the hand-drawn doodle atop Herb Caen’s longtime newspaper column depicted a composite cityscape with the Transamerica Pyramid bending at an impressive degree that makes the Millennium Tower look like an amateur.
Juicero, a product first marketed for home use in 2013, planned to revolutionize the sourcing and extraction of fresh juice, a commodity humans have procured and ingested for millennia unaided by a $400 contraption so full of itself that it even included a QR reader. It was backed by $118 million in venture funding. Then in 2017, Bloomberg reporters demonstrated that the individual-serving packages of fruits and veggies (shipped via subscription) could be hand-squeezed, no machine needed, and the company folded soon after. One hopes investors, including Kleiner Perkins, found solace in the adage, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade the old-fashioned way like your grandma did.”
If your great-grandmother had a business failure in late-19th-century San Francisco, she was likely plucky enough “to have found both the resolve and the resources to return to the world of commerce,” according to Edith Sparks, author of Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco 1850–1920. “Some did so over and over again,” she writes,“failing as many as three times and still finding a way to reopen their businesses.”
In recent decades, the VC industry has changed the scope of both upside and downside potential. “In the early years of venture capital,” longtime Menlo Park investor and industry influencer Dixon Doll reflects, “the fear of failure was a driving force for an aspiring VC, but as the years went by, the industry has become much more sophisticated and international in scope, which applies to lots of different sectors, including semiconductors, drug development, life sciences and many other areas that have transformed the world.”
Olivia Wise
A failure can be due to an idea ahead of its time. In 2000, during the awkward phase of e-tail and dot-com overvaluations, Pets.com (headquartered on Brannan Street) had become such an icon of the era that writer Henry Norr didn’t even need to say its name when he wrote, “No matter how you slice it, I can’t see how anyone can ever hope to make money FedExing kitty litter around the country.” A good quip at the time, but today there’s a successful NYSE-listed company called Chewy that sells brands from Alpo to Tidy Cats online. Not to mention a big amazon of a company that has made a respectable amount of money shipping everything everywhere.
Google Glass may be gone, but Google has continued iterating versions of VR devices and platforms, including Cardboard and Daydream, demonstrating the quality that author Tom Kelley (partner at San Francisco–based design firm IDEO) called, in the very title of his book, Creative Confidence. “While much has been said about fear of failure,” he writes, “it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success.”
Olivia Wise
Back in 2014, rock legend and then-Peninsula resident Neil Young launched Pono, which combined a library of high-resolution music files and a portable player. Explaining how much sound quality gets lost via compression with other formats, Young employed metaphors such as viewing a landscape through a dirty window. Despite Pono’s superb sound, the public was moving to streaming services and not prioritizing quality. “The record labels killed it,” Young noted in a 2018 Los Angeles Times interview, “by insisting on charging two to three times as much for the high-res files as for MP3s. Why would anybody pay three times as much?”
Speaking of sound quality, guests enjoying performances at Davies Symphony Hall may not know they’re experiencing version 2.0. When it opened in 1980, the place had an acoustics problem. Since the building was a philanthropic gift to the city from Louise M. Davies, criticism was a delicate matter. During opening weeks, San Francisco Examiner writer Michael Walsh tried hard to give it the benefit of time, as if a new music space were like a fresh pair of shoes that needed to be broken in before they stopped scraping against one’s Achilles tendons. “Not bad, depending on where you sit” was one of his locutions. In 1992, a $10 million renovation was unveiled after years of planning by master acoustician R. Lawrence Kirkegaard. One thinks of the philosopher of the same surname, who famously quipped, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
