We had a spectacular demo failure yesterday

We had a spectacular demo failure yesterday.

Someone I met at RSA was testing the product. It exploded on an onboarding step. We know the root cause and put controls in place so it or something similar doesn't happen again. But that's not why I'm sharing this.

LinkedIn is full of funding announcements, new customers, product-market fit stories. Not enough people share the moments that hurt.

This one hurt.

Cy Khormaee said something to me a few weeks ago, right after we came out of stealth, that I keep coming back to in my head: your job now is to be a cockroach. There will be bad demos, poorly timed bugs and deals lost for reasons outside your control. You can't let any of it take you down. You survive, you push through, you keep moving.

That framing stuck because it makes resilience concrete. Resilience is a sequence. Run an honest debrief fast. Separate a situational problem from a structural one before you conflate them. Get back to making decisions instead of sitting in the failure.

Today stung for all the right reasons. And it clarified something for me - the founders who make it through have a recovery process mindset, even before they needed it. They've seen it all and have practiced the sequence enough times that it runs almost automatically.

Our own debrief started as soon as we identified what happened: what broke, what was in our control, and what changes before the next demo, what guardrails need to be added, what needs to change in our process. I was back to building and doing outreach within 2 hours.

The first move you make in the hour after a failure probably says more about you and how you'll do long-term than the failure itself. Still thinking about what mine says about me.