The Two Types of Giving Up
Kill the tactic that isn't working — never kill the mission while you still have a team and resources.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 60%
Drawn from Ben Silberman's path from a failed medical-records idea, to the failed Tote shopping app, to Pinterest, this framework distinguishes two very different meanings of 'giving up.' The first is healthy and necessary: declaring that a specific approach, product, or tactic isn't working and stopping it quickly. The second is fatal: concluding that because one approach failed, the entire company or mission should be shut down. The mechanism is that persistence should apply to the mission and the team, not to any single tactic — pivoting fast while keeping a team and its accumulated working knowledge intact preserves far more value than disbanding and starting over.
Origin
Extracted from Acquired
Core principles
- 01Fail fast on tactics, not on the overall mission
- 02A team that has worked (or failed) together develops valuable shared operating knowledge
- 03If you're debating whether to pivot, you likely should have already pivoted
- 04Only shut down when you truly lack the desire or resources to keep going
How to run it
- 1
Diagnose what specifically isn't working
Identify the exact product, feature, or approach that has failed to gain traction, separate from the company's broader mission.
- 2
Kill it quickly
Stop investing in the failed tactic as soon as the evidence is clear, rather than continuing to prop it up.
Watch out Waiting too long to pivot means you're already overdue.
- 3
Keep the team together
Retain the people, communication norms, and operating knowledge built while working on the failed approach.
- 4
Listen to users for the next signal
Look for the feature or behavior users are gravitating toward organically, even inside a 'failed' product.
- 5
Redirect toward the new opportunity
Pivot the same team and resources into the new direction rather than declaring the company over.
In the wild
Ben Silberman's medical-history startup idea failed to launch, then his mobile shopping app Tote failed to gain users. Instead of shutting down, he and his small team noticed users liked Tote's 'save for later' feature and pivoted the same team into what became Pinterest.
→ The persistence through two failed product ideas, without shutting down the company, eventually produced a company that IPO'd at a $12.6 billion valuation.
Common mistakes
Treating tactic failure as mission failure
Concluding the whole company should close just because one product didn't work wastes accumulated team value.
Pivoting too late
If you're seriously debating a pivot, the data likely already supported it earlier.
Breaking up the team unnecessarily
Disbanding a team that has learned to work together sacrifices hard-won operating efficiency.
Is it for you?
Not ideal for
Situations where the founder has genuinely lost all desire or resources to continue — forcing persistence there is unhealthy.
From the transcript
“the way to succeed is to just never admit failure. Like as long as you don't shut down, you haven't lost.”
“one version of it is what we are doing is not working. We have failed at that, we are going to give up doing that.…”
From the episode
The Pinterest IPO