What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup?
cmos: A friend and I were talking about how scotch is made.  We know nothing about scotch except that a popular kind is aged for 10 years before being bottled and sold.So, in theory, it would take 10 years before you knew if it was a good batch or not.  You might be able to tell sooner, but you'd have to know what it should taste like before it's 'ready'.  This can only come from experience.So we deduced that it would be very difficult to start a business of making scotch if it took 10 years to know if we got it right, with no prior experience.Then my friend added "also, how could you run a company that doesn't make money for 10 years?" to which we burst out laughing, as my company hasn't made money in 10 years.  We've made money for periods of time, and had our ups and downs, but overall we have lost more than we made.But this year we should make a bunch.  We've branched out of our core competency and added products that widen our market that we can sell to our existing customers and leverage off our brand name.  We've gotten a lot smarter about how we do business.  It just took longer than I thought.  At least if I was starting a scotch business I'd have known that it would take 10 years ahead of time.In my business I'm often meeting rather successful, wealthy people as they are our end customer.  One of them recently said to me: "It took me 20 years to become an overnight success".