[[Ehsan's Notes]], [[Micro Book]] ### Lessons from an ambitious social venture that tried & failed to improve prosthetic care around the world — the story of the OpenSocket ![[532.jpg]] Business books are usually written by widely successful people, right? Like the founder of a company that sold for millions, or these days, billions of dollars? or some business guru that has saved dozens of companies with a simple 1,2,3 process? How often have you seen a business book about failure? written by a designer? about a nonprofit? working on prosthetics? for the developing world? Those were probably all "no's" but whose counting? This is a different kind of business book — it is a book about my favorite failure. We've all heard the statistics, yes, most startup ventures fail and, yea sure, Silicon Valley claims to celebrate failure but seemingly only if it is fast and quickly turns into successful profit. Most are not comfortable with failure — I am not, and that is okay but it doesn't mean we shouldn't make an effort to discuss it gracefully and learn from it. If your goal is to raise a ton of VC capital or make millions of dollars, this is probably not the right book for you. But if you give a damn about making a positive impact on the world, are working on a social venture, want to learn from someone else's failure, working on healthcare or prosthetics, or thinking about patenting your invention, you might want to skim a few of the chapters of this online micro book. ### The Backstory After 5 years of tireless work (2008-2014) on the [[OpenSocket]] my co-founders and I made the difficult decision to shut down in early 2014. Even though we had proven the experts wrong and successfully created [[(I) An incredible off the shelf prosthetic arm that adjusts to fit]] in less than 30 minutes, we hadn't managed to create large enough revenue streams in time to keep our doors open. It was was devastating and for years, I wasn't really ready to talk about it or even think much about it. Today, 7 years have passed since we shut down operations and we still couldn't bring ourselves to shut down the website. We kept it up as a representative of our former aspirations, maybe as a way to keep the door open on a dream that hadnt't come true yet. It was time to shut down our website and stop paying the Squarespace bill. Yet, I couldn't bring myself to take it down without putting something in it's place. As I started brainstorming and discussing various options with my co-founder, Adam, I also began to reflect and journal about our work, piece by piece I started to write what would eventually become what you see here. This is a case study and freely-available reference that can live on past the life of our organization to document our successes, innovations, mistakes, and failures for the benefit of other social entrepreneurs or prosthetic designers that might be able to build off of our work — rather than our invention, or the 112 amputees we fit with our arm, maybe a few nuggets of insight shared with the readers of this book will be the true legacy of our work. We encourage you to freely res-use anything of value without restriction. On the pages that follow are over 50 lessons we learned on our journey. If you were my friend working on a similar project and asked me for advice, this is what I would tell you. We have divided up the chapters into 7 main sections that will make it easier to navigate the lessons. 1. Preface 2. Introduction 3. Prosthetics 4. Nonprofit Entrepreneurship 5. Problem Solving: Research & Design 6. Thoughts on mental health, depression, & sustainability 7. Reflecting Back on Success & Failure #### START -> [[Chapters of my favorite failure]]