You've got an idea that you think society needs. Your friends and family discourage you, but you go ahead. With a small amount of money and everything you can beg or get on credit, you start your enterprise. After a lot of hard work, and good, bad, and unexpected experiences -- you fail; you lose your money, your dream, other people's dreams that you inspired and, of course, other people's money. What now?

In Silicon Valley, you accept the loss and start over.

"There's just social acceptance of failure in this climate. And without an acceptance of failure, you have a concomitant level of acceptance for risk. So you have to be able to fail in order to take a risk. If you die when you fall down skiing, not many people are going to take up skiing. And so if you commit social suicide by starting a company that fails, not very many companies start, and so you find that the people that have the education and the standing in those societies don't take the risk."
Nolan Bushnell
Founder, Atari Corporation

In the Silicon Valley culture, risk is exalted.

"The glory of life is that you can fail, and you cannot fail if you try hard."
Barney Oliver
Founding Director of Research, Hewlett-Packard Labs

"There's no good time to start your own company. No matter when you pick the time, it's always going to be risky. So I decided that, what the heck, I would do it. If worse comes to worse and I fail, I'll go back and get a job."
David Lam
Founder of Lam Research

"You have to create opportunity for people to fail safely, because no one can have a 100% success."
Alejandro Zaffaroni
Founder, Syntex, ALZA, and Affymax

"People said we were crazy. What kept us going was probably several things. Perhaps one of the key ones was the camaraderie that you immediately form with this small group of founders because you're stuck in the situation and you've got to prove it to each other."
James Hobart
Founder, Coherent

"Risk-taking has become almost celebrated in Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship has become celebrated. The most sought-after positions are often in small firms or in startups, which is very different from the rest of the country. People in Silicon Valley recognize that you may learn from failure, and in fact, there's an important element of learning about technology, about organization, about many things through the process of failure. You have many people in Silicon Valley who have started multiple companies. They fail, and then they start right back up again."
Annalee Saxenian
Author, Regional Advantage

"Some of the failures are as widely discussed as the successes. And even in the failures, people are admired for trying. You've got to act, and you've got to be willing to fail. You've got to be willing to crash and burn. If you're afraid of failing, you won't get very far."
Steve Jobs
Founder, Apple Computer and NeXT

"Nothing venture, nothing win."
Sir William S. Gilbert
The Mikado

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