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Every founder has felt this feeling; most more than once. You have given the work everything you have. You put all your eggs in one basket, achieved the awards and the admiration of peers and strangers alike, and built something from nothing.
Having set your feet to the hard, lonely road, you reach the pinnacle. You take a seat to enjoy the view and catch your breath, only to find an even taller and more impassable summit ahead, with nothing left to get you there. You smile at your team and shoulder your burden, leading them to a destination you know you likely won’t reach.
With all the classical signals for success, you have failed. You have nothing to show for it but the calloused hands and feet that brought you here. You have reached the end of the road, the fruit of your labour turning to ashes in your mouth with no third-act plot twist to save you. This failure is proof that you should not have even set out. *If you were good enough, this should have worked.*
Or so I thought, as I am sure many other founders do when this first happens.
I have spent many long nights wondering what might have happened if I had taken action sooner, pivoted when presented with a particular piece of information, or pushed someone out of the business when I could. It is in these moments I accepted something both profound and obvious: failure is a gift few people receive in the right way.
I have seen many people hold failure at arm's length, discarding it as a bad attempt whilst clutching any success close to them. I have realised the value of both. The only true failure is one you don’t learn from; conversely, the only true success is one where you have identified and reinforced what got you there.
The Ashes Project is my answer to this. I cannot guarantee success, but I can maintain a toolbox of all the lessons learnt from both my success and failures. With this toolbox, I have a space to interrogate my thinking and track my evolution to better learn from my past, as well as creating a shared space to teach those lessons to others.
The Ashes Project is an ongoing journey into what it takes to build tech, teams, and drive innovation; all told from my perspective and completely AI-free.
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