Ram Tripathi

Behind every product hall of fame lies a much larger product graveyard. It is filled with ideas that once felt promising, late nights that once felt urgent, and prototypes that briefly carried hope before being left behind. Most of this work is never celebrated. Much of it is never even remembered. And yet, none of the wins exist without it.

Every successful product is preceded by a long stretch of uncertainty. Teams try things that do not land. They ship features no one uses. They believe in ideas that the world quietly rejects. This can feel demoralizing if you expect progress to be clean or linear. But this messiness is not failure. It is the price of learning something real.

The truth is that success cannot be reasoned into existence. It has to be discovered. Markets do not reveal themselves in planning documents. Users do not behave the way we expect them to. The only way forward is to put something into the world, listen closely, and adjust without hesitation. That requires courage, because most attempts will not work.

What makes this tolerable is the asymmetry. Failures are bounded. Success is not. One breakthrough can justify years of false starts and dead ends. One product that truly resonates can repay every experiment that came before it, both financially and emotionally. The graveyard looks large only until you understand what it is funding.

The best teams learn to make peace with this reality. They move quickly not because they are reckless, but because they respect time. They iterate fast not because they do not care, but because they care too much to wait. They know that standing still feels safer, but it guarantees nothing.

In the end, the hall of fame is not built by avoiding the graveyard. It is built by walking through it, again and again, with enough belief to keep going and enough humility to let go. The work that fails is not wasted. It is what makes the work that succeeds possible.