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For business leaders, embracing and learning from failure is a must. And nowhere is that more important than in industries built on entrepreneurship and innovation. That’s why we asked the CEOs of four portfolio companies — Tines, Petlove, Variant Bio, and LUMICKS — to tell us about a misstep they made that led them to rethink their tactics. Their answers touch on topics as varied as M&amp;A, leadership, value creation, and product development. Here’s what they told us.

<h2>What’s a mistake you’ve made as a leader — and what did you learn from it? </h2> Eoin Hinchy, Tines: Don’t think you have all the answers “Founder mode” is a big thing in Silicon Valley. As a founder, you think that you should know the answer to every problem and be in charge of every decision. But I&#039;ve learned that&#039;s not the case.While trying to develop something with AI that actually added real value and wasn&#039;t just a nice, glitzy demo, we went through 70 failed experiments. We thought we could use a third-party sub-processor to power our AI capabilities. Our customers went ballistic and said no, absolutely not. Then we thought, should we be an LLM research lab and train our own models? When that failed, I started to doubt that we could have an undifferentiated, truly customer-additive solution. But we kept going and eventually found a way to combine the best of what we do — <a target="_blank" href="/insights/tines-ceo-eoin-hinchy-ai-workflow-automation">eliminating muck work through workflow automation</a> — and use AI to scale it.

My biggest mistake was underestimating how much motivated and hungry teams of creative people can do. There&#039;s really no limit to what they can achieve, so I’ve learned to continue giving these people more responsibility.

Talita Lacerda, Petlove: M&amp;A is harder than you think I always welcome mistakes. We want to break things as fast as possible so we can learn and fix them quickly. One mistake that sticks in my mind is underestimating some of the complexity around acquisitions, especially in regards to retaining key talent and technology integration. You need to have the right incentives for founders who are joining your team. Early on, we used time-based incentives — if founders stayed for a certain period, they’d be rewarded. That didn’t work, and the founders left. I am now a big believer in setting goals that will create value for both you and the founders whose company you are acquiring. You have to be clear about those goals and how they’re going to be measured, so you can be fair to everyone. They can be about acquiring new customers, or a certain level of cash generation, or an increase in revenue, or something else that’s valuable and measurable. And you need to give the founders the resources to execute against those goals. We’ve taken this learning into many of our acquisitions and it’s worked quite well.

In the early days, I also failed to understand the complexity of tech integrations. Unless you can do them successfully, you’re not going to be able to extract synergies. Now we have a tech team involved in the acquisition process so we can understand how hard integration will be and how long it will take. If the path to integration is too long, we may not do the deal.

Andrew Farnum, Variant Bio: Value creation can happen in unexpected ways  We built “VB-Inference” as a data analytics platform for internal use, so we could surface insights from all the genomic and other data we collected all over the world. We always thought of it as just an internal tool. As I started talking to outside companies, it became clear that I had failed to see the additional value of what we had built. I realized that even very large pharma and biotech companies didn’t have a tool as sophisticated as ours for analyzing genetic data or applying the latest techniques from AI.

I started to think: “How can we leverage this incredible capability that we built for internal use with the outside world?” And that completely changed my thinking on how to approach partnerships. <a target="_blank" href="/insights/variant-bio-genomic-discovery">We’re now capitalizing on VB-Inference</a> by giving outside companies access to it. It’s generating significant value for us and bringing in non-dilutive capital.  The lesson is: Take a step back from time to time to re-evaluate your strategy — you might be missing ways in which you have created value.

Hugo de Wit, Lumicks: Don’t constrain yourself Don’t stop just because you’ve reached a big milestone. Once you see your product working and have a clear idea about the value you’ve created, you need to make sure you control everything around it. If not, you risk becoming dependent on others who will end up benefiting more from your investment. So you should add those elements and make them part of your roadmap. A good example is Amazon, which delivers its own shipments. They realized that relying on the United States Postal Service wouldn’t work for promises like delivery within 24 hours. So although that wasn’t an essential part of Amazon’s business initially, it became an essential part. Amazon was bold enough to go after that, and it paid off.

In other words, it’s not enough to <a target="_blank" href="/insights/lumicks-hugo-de-witt-qa">have a good product</a>. If you rely on somebody else, you run the risk of destroying your whole value proposition in the end. You need to be able to make your product yourself. This will drive more value over time. We failed to do this with our first product. We outsourced assembly and production relatively early. This separated the R&amp;D from the operations and made it difficult and slow to implement any improvements in design and quality on an ongoing basis. We changed the approach with our next product and included all this in our workflows.So the mistake, I would say, is limiting yourself and not being bold enough.

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CHRO - Q1 2025

What four startup CEOs learned from failure

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The power of getting it wrong

CEOs reflect on mistakes that shaped their approach

Variant Bio: Genomic discovery on the road less traveled

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