The startup lesson Australia still struggles with
Australia still treats startup failure as a fatal flaw — but it's a crucial step. To build deep tech success, we need to rethink how we view and embrace it.
At Main Sequence, we backed companies tackling some of the hardest problems in science and technology. One such company is Gilmour Space Technologies, which is building and launching rockets from Australia, aiming to compete in the space currently dominated by SpaceX, the company responsible for the majority of global payload launches.
Gilmour has finally received its first launch permit. I’ll save you the suspense — we already know it’s very, very likely its first attempt will fail to reach orbit. No similar company has successfully reached orbit on its first try. Most early launches fail to lift off, explode on the ground or falter in transit.
If that does happen, it will be a failure in that specific mission, but not a failure overall. Not by our metric. The Gilmour team will undertake a forensic analysis of why, and this will make the next attempt more likely to succeed. And if that fails, the next attempt will be more likely to succeed again.
One of the defining characteristics of startups and venture capital, particularly in deep tech, is an acceptance of failure. A better framing would probably be a ‘tolerance’ of failure. It’s not that failure is a good thing, per se. It’s just understood as a necessary part of progress.
