As a longtime startup investor and judge on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” Barbara Corcoran has a lot of practice gauging which entrepreneurs will ultimately become highly successful — and which ones will struggle.
Specifically, Corcoran likes to watch what entrepreneurs do when something goes wrong with their business, she told journalist Katie Couric’s “Wake Up Call at Work” newsletter, which published on Aug. 28.
“I pay close attention to who takes responsibility and who plays the blame game,” said Corcoran. “Six months after ‘Shark Tank,’ something always goes wrong — the supplier didn’t deliver, the molds were wrong, an employee messed up. But the minute an entrepreneur starts blaming the next guy, I know it’s over and they’re going to lose my money.”
Entrepreneurs are typically responsible, legally and financially, for any mistakes or failures that happen within their company, whether they personally caused them or not, according to Corcoran. So it’s important to address missteps head-on, and it’s just as crucial to learn from them afterward, she told author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss on a March 2024 episode of his podcast.
“Recovering from failure, in my book, is 95% of life,” Corcoran told Ferriss. “If you’re going to have a good life, you’d better be really good at getting back up, like a jack-in-the-box, boom, boom, boom. Just get back up.”
