Born
Loser, And Proud of It
From Scarsdale, the Site of "Failure"
By
Clay Andres, The Westchester County Times, July 2000
Are
you youngish, an adventuresome, risk-taking type? Then Failure
magazine is for you, and so are failuremag.com and all the Failure-brand
products: mugs, hats, pencils, bags, mints and a full line of clothing.
If
you can bear it, you’ll have to wait just a little.
Failuremag.com,
the online magazine of everything that isn’t fame or fortune,
is scheduled to launch (or go live, in Web terminology) in the third
week of July. Then some Failure products are to be available
to the sensitive Web purchaser, with more to come as the site expands.
A full clothing line is expected to start showing up in stores in
New York City and L.A., and a printed newsletter, followed by a
bound magazine printed on real paper, is also in the works for the
indefinite future.
To
hear all that from Jason Zasky, editor and chief executive officer
of Failure (one is tempted to refer to him as the biggest
failure of them all), you would think we were about to witness the
first great brand of the 21st century, predicated on
our natural fascination with failure. He is proud of and enthusiastic
about his product, and so one can forgive him a little youthful
marketing hyperbole. How could he sleep with himself if he didn’t
believe in what he’s doing? (Actually, he sleeps only five
hours on a good night. "Our leisurely 14-hour days have turned
into serious 18-hour ones," he said.)
It’s
easy to joke about failure, and the irony of trying to capitalize
on the failures of others is patently obvious. But Mr. Zasky is
genuinely, passionately serious about the value of writing about
and branding failure. "It’s a serious, sophisticated magazine,"
he said in his friendly, even-toned manner. "Failure is a universal
experience, and people gravitate towards stories that are failure-related.
But we don’t judge or try to make failure a personal issue.
We don’t look at failure in a negative light. Our name is obviously
very provocative, but the magazine isn’t designed to be provocative.
It’s thought provoking."
You
can almost guess from thoughtful statements like this that Mr. Zasky
was a philosophy or psychology major, and he majored in both at
Emory University in Atlanta. At 30, he speaks carefully and draws
on a broad range of knowledge acquired as a writer covering music,
finance, sports and other subjects. His freelance career led him
to Nashville, to become managing editor of Musician magazine.
But his tenure ended after nine months when the magazine…failed.
I
had already been thinking about Failure magazine for some
time," said Mr. Zasky. "This just accelerated my decision
to go ahead with it by a couple of months." Actually, the original
idea was not Mr. Zasky’s. There was a partner, whom Mr. Zasky
seemed reluctant to speak of in detail. In brief, the partnership
failed, Mr. Zasky kept the idea, enlisted a Musician magazine
colleague as a new business partner and left Tennessee for New York.
Although
born of failure, Failure magazine seems to have had a charmed
gestation. Upon discovering the cost of office rentals in New York
City’s Silicon Alley, Mr. Zasky chose instead the relatively
low-rent suburban charms of Scarsdale. He actually grew up in Westchester
County, where his father was chief operating officer at Blythedale
Children’s Hospital and his mother commuted to Becton Dickinson,
the pharmaceuticals company, in New Jersey. And, at least for now,
he’s happy back home.
From
a little brick hous—one might almost call it quaint, in a late
40’s sort of way—across the tracks from the train station,
Mr. Zasky and his new business partner, Kathleen Ervin, have mapped
out their financial road to, well, success. The Scarsdale house
is a good place to camp out, like a trailer with a hook-up, close
to the FedEx office and the train to Manhattan. Mr. Zasky figures
they’ll be working in the city within the year.
He
eluded the big bucks of venture capital and the fast track of Internet
incubators. Instead, he found two principal investors and a very
modest capitalization of "between $150,000 and $250,000,"
he says.
"What
we show is that you don’t need millions of dollars to launch
a great company," he argued. "You can go a long way with
a great idea that’s original."
It
may not appeal to parents and grandparents at the golf course in
Scarsdale, but Failure seems to resonate, at least with the
target group from which it sprang. The Boston Globe plans to interview
Mr. Zasky for a front-page story on the Sunday before failuremag.com
receives its first browser. Already he has been interviewed for
a segment on "All Things Considered," National Public
Radio’s popular afternoon program. This is big-time coverage,
and Failure hasn’t even sent out its press kit yet.
To
compete in a world of one-and two-dimensional press releases, Mr.
Zasky and Ms. Ervin are sending out 500 sleek wire wastepaper baskets
complete with pre-crumpled collateral. How can a marked-for-extinction
journalist not take notice, even permit a fleeting smile to cross
his or her face? Since it doesn’t have the immense marketing
budget of other Internet startups, Failure is relying on
its touted uniqueness, as well as word-of-mouth, to create success.
They’ll know very quickly whether the word gets out.
When
I visited Failure’s office in mid-June, the DSL line
(the high-speed connection to the Internet) was down, and had been
behaving badly for several weeks. The phone company was failing
to take care of the problem. That explained why my initial e-mail
query to Mr. Zasky had not been received in a timely fashion. The
iMac was working fine, but without a connection to the outside world
Mr. Zasky couldn’t show me the prototypes for his Web site.
And what is an Internet start-up without a site? Altogether a flop,
a fiasco, finito, kaput.
However,
I was told that Failure’s site developers are hard at
work in Arizona, and that the servers responsible for handling the
onrush of visitors to the site are more reliably connected at their
location in Oklahoma. Indeed, Mr. Zasky insists that he’s better
prepared than many a much-better-capitalized startup, and, while
clearly not getting much sleep, he appeared remarkably calm the
whole time I was there. Of course, he was the only one there, and
the phones were silent. Was that a good sign? Could the whole thing
be just a cover for some nefarious goal of world domination…and
why is it that such projects always fail so miserably? — at
least in the movies they do.
Speaking
of movies, Failure’s Bomb Site is sure to be one of
its most popular features. That interactive page allows visitors
to decide which movie ideas appeal to them and which sound like
bombs, and to explain why. "It’s a way for studios to
find out how well their movies will do and what biases moviegoers
harbor, before the first box-office receipts are even in,"
explained Mr. Zasky of Failure’s new spin on the popularity
contest.
Standard
magazine fare also was being prepared: articles about he world’s
greatest golfer never to succeed on the pro tour; an interview with
Bill Buckner, perpetrator of what may be the greatest error in baseball
history, and even some thoughts on failure by Steve Wozniak, one
of Apple’s co-founders.
Is
this the road to success? Can our success-obsessed society really
find comfort in glorifying, or at least publicizing, the failures
of others? It’s practically Aesopian, where the lessons learned
are all based on negative behaviors. It the "don’t-do-it-or-else"
school of child rearing elevated to adulthood. Perhaps moralistic
tales really strike at our basic human nature. But can you make
a brand out of this?
Apparently,
Jason Zasky hasn’t stopped to worry. "We feel that the
greatest failure is in not having tried," he said.
So,
forward into the void.
This
article appeared in the July 2000 issue of the Westchester County
Times
Copyright
© 2000 The Westchester County Times
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