It’s no secret that most startups fail. 9 in 10 of them, to be exact.

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Failure is remarkably common, yet rarely remarked upon. When it happens, founders tend to back slowly out of the room, taking the elephant with them. There’s no announcement, and certainly no autopsy. LinkedIn profiles are scrubbed of anything unsightly. CVs are quietly cleansed. Career gaps are preferred over having taken a risk and lost.

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All that’s left is the occasional whisper: “Did you hear they folded?” or “Do you think they’ll start something new?”

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That’s why proptech startup Tract recently stopped me - and many others - in our tracks. With their blog post titled “A Postmortem of a Startup”, the founders, Jamie and Henry, laid out clearly and publicly the internal missteps and external pressures that led the company to wind down.

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Naturally, it attracted attention. But the post wasn’t a scoop. It wasn’t a scandal. It was a study. A study of an extremely common event told with uncommon honesty. It got me thinking: why don’t we see more of this? 

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As a species, we’re wired to avoid failure. In evolutionary terms, failure could mean getting eaten or exiled. The stakes are rarely life-threatening in the startup world, but our instinct for self-preservation still kicks in. That means keeping up appearances for investors, peers, employees, and even ourselves.

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But if we want a healthier, more resilient startup ecosystem, we need to get more comfortable with failing. Failure goes hand in hand with progress, creativity, and innovation. Studies even suggest that failure makes us smarter. That said, there’s a world of difference between failing and failing well. Tract has offered us a new blueprint for the latter.

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Recognising failure isn’t glamorous – it’s a luxury

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One of the most striking things about Jamie and Henry’s piece was how responsibly they handled failure. They didn’t glamorise it as a startup rite of passage – a danger my colleague Michael Tefula, Principal and Head of Product at Ada, warned of when he wrote about the “Failure Myth” for Forbes back in 2012. His points still hold. Stories of bouncing back can inspire, but they can also distort reality. When we glorify failure too much, we risk trivialising the cost of it, and forgetting that not everyone has the luxury to fail.

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For some of the very best founders, failure carries higher personal and professional stakes. Those from underrepresented backgrounds, for example, often operate with less margin for error, especially when it comes to getting a business off the ground in the first place. For founders who aren’t the best connected, legitimacy can feel more fragile, and future investment opportunities less certain.

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We, as a community, need to interrogate who we extend compassion and second chances to, and who feels safe to fail. For now, though, we can at least acknowledge that when founders in more privileged positions choose to be open, they create space for others to follow.

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Failing well for future you

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Failing well isn’t just a nice way to bow out. It can also be strategic. Taking accountability helps protect future relationships with investors, teammates, and the wider ecosystem. 

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Tract’s founders have noted that they could have continued pushing toward revenue, but they lost the conviction to do so at the level demanded by a venture investment. Rather than dragging the company along, they chose to call time. In doing so, they demonstrated good judgement, integrity, and a serious commitment to their fiduciary duty. These are all qualities investors actively look for when deciding who to back next.

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Tract’s approach also kept bridges with their own investors intact. Both Reece Chowdhry, Founding Partner at Concept Ventures, and Ada’s own Matt Penneycard shared posts on LinkedIn commending Tract’s founders for their bravery and humility. And both said they’d like to see more of this in the ecosystem. 

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I’ve no doubt the ‘What’s Next’ section of their blog was read as closely as any other. Not out of morbid curiosity, but because their approach showed real self-awareness, offered alternative paths for others exploring this space, and made it clear they still have a bright future ahead.

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Bringing the ecosystem with you

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By talking about failure, we can normalise it as a natural part of the journey, not the end of it. This creates room for honest conversations – ones that could seriously benefit the mental health of founders (who often report feeling exhausted or overworked).

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But this public, thoughtful reflection wasn’t just a candid account of what went wrong. It was instructive. Jamie and Henry open-sourced their learnings, complete with a detailed table of contents that included jump-to sections that guided founders straight to the parts most relevant to them. If even one founder reads it and course-corrects, that’s a net gain for the entire ecosystem.

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By stepping into a world where failure is allowed, we also stand to make more progress. Matt Lerner, CEO of SYSTM, captured this perfectly in a recent LinkedIn post in which he recounted a conversation with a former design leader at a $100bn company. Her team, she told him, ran around a thousand experiments a week. Only 9% of them succeeded.

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Even at the highest levels, the vast majority of efforts don’t work. But they keep testing, keep iterating, and crucially, keep talking about what isn’t working. As Matt put in: ‘if you’re not failing, you’re not learning. And if you stop learning, sooner or later, you’ll stop earning.’

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Final thoughts on failure

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Perhaps the reason Tract’s post landed so powerfully is that it was deeply relatable. Fear of failure touches every founder, and also every investor too. But when shared openly, those moments can turn cliff edges into a springboard.

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Their openness captures what we value most at Ada: recognising the courage behind every risk and celebrating both wins and failures as important steps in learning together. It’s through these moments, successes and setbacks alike, that we build a stronger, braver ecosystem. 

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To any founders reading: take what’s useful from Tract’s example. Stay lean where you can. Lean on your investors - that’s what they’re there for. Don’t forget to experiment. And if you do decide to call time, don’t feel you have to disappear. You don’t need to write a full post-mortem. But even a thoughtful LinkedIn post can go a long way. Not just for others, but for your future you. 

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I, and the whole Ada team, won’t forget Tract and its founders in a hurry, but for all the right reasons.

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