Michael Dell: Failure is a teacher but do not repeat

Dell founder Michael Dell stated that it is difficult to achieve great success without making mistakes, as failure is the best teacher. He added that it is more important to learn from mistakes and not to repeat them.

The two points are linked. The first allows for trial and error, while the second disqualifies the repetition of mistakes. He did not specify any particular product or acquisition, discussing the relationship between success and failure, rather than a specific news item.

Dell started in 1984 in a dormitory at the University of Texas, using upgraded computers and direct sales to bypass dealer inventory. In 2013, he privatized the company with Silver Lake for about $24.9 billion, citing the pressure from public shareholders on quarterly performance as a reason for the transformation. In 2016, he completed the acquisition of EMC for about $67 billion, and in 2018, the company went public again.

This period of privatization is often used by him to illustrate that the public market immediately prices the cost of mistakes into stock prices, and the restructuring was to allow for a longer correction time. The direct sales model itself was developed from mistakes in dealer inventory, assembling computers to order rather than stocking them in advance.

The speech did not include new financial reports or products. It defines "failure" as a teacher and "repeating" as disqualified. Internally, it can be understood as allowing the first deviation but not allowing the same deviation to enter the next procurement or production line.

The buyers are companies and investors who can turn a mistake into a process, while the sellers are teams that repeatedly price the same error. The event is driven by the speech. Capital will not reward stagnation from not making mistakes, nor will it reward expansion from repeating mistakes; those who benefit are operators who correct channels and payment terms and do not return to old paths, while those under pressure are projects that treat failure as a story and repeat the same next quarter.

Source: Public Information