---
title: "Five Whys: Try to Learn a Dollar's Worth of Lesson for Every One You Spend in Failure"
description: "Eric Ries quoted me in his Venture Hacks guide to Five Whys: try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every dollar spent in failure. The line came from Amazon GameDay practice."
doc_version: "1.0"
last_updated: 2008-11-17
slug: five-whys-jesse-robbins-quote-venturehacks
outlet: Venture Hacks
author: Eric Ries
date: 2008-11-17
url: https://venturehacks.com/five-whys-2
type: Quote
excerpt: "Eric Ries quoted me in his Venture Hacks guide to Five Whys: try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every dollar spent in failure. The line came from Amazon GameDay practice."
quote: Try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every one you spend in failure.
quoteAuthor: Jesse Robbins
tags:
  - Resilience Engineering
  - DevOps
  - Five Whys
  - Lean Startup
  - GameDay
  - Amazon
---

> "Try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every one you spend in failure."
> — Jesse Robbins

Eric Ries quoted me in his November 2008 Venture Hacks post on implementing Toyota's Five Whys methodology at startups. The line he pulled was the one I had been saying about Amazon's GameDay practice: try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every dollar spent in failure.

The idea behind it is what GameDay was built on. The cost of an outage is fixed once it happens. The learning you extract from it is not. We ran scheduled, deliberate failures at Amazon to force the learning before the unscheduled failures could take it. Eric saw the same shape inside a startup: a failed experiment is not waste if you pull proportional learning out of it, and Five Whys was his mechanism for making that extraction systematic instead of accidental.

The lineage I care about is fire department to data center to startup. Same discipline, different scale.

## Also Mentioned

- [Eric Ries](https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/) (person)
- [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com) (company)
- [Venture Hacks](https://venturehacks.com) (company)

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