Welcome to the Smart Startup English Podcast!
Our goal is to help startup professionals take their English from intermediate to advanced in just 10 minutes a day. In each episode, we’ll talk about a topic related to the startup world, and we’ll learn some vocabulary that you can use to sound more natural in your day-to-day business interactions in English.
In this episode, we’re teaching a few Business English terms you need to know to talk about how to cope with failure when your startup doesn’t take off as well as you were expecting. This episode was inspired by a 2018 article in New York Magazine describing the way in which German startups are learning to deal with failure.
But first, let me ask you this:
Our intro question is not going to be about whether you’ve failed or not, but about how you feel about failure. When you do fail, how do you react?
The article starts by describing a group of technology entrepreneurs who gathered in a co-working space to mourn their dead startups. The purpose of this event was to promote a healthy attitude towards failure because German founders and investors don’t usually tend to see failure as a good thing.
Berlin-based founders whose companies tanked report that their reputation tends to suffer in the local startup scene due to the stigma of failure. To tank means to fail – often due to serious financial problems. We can say ‘a company tanked’ or we can say ‘the economy tanked.’
A stigma is a mark of shame, disgrace or dishonor that a society applies to a certain behavior or a group of people. Often this negative set of beliefs is unfair. Stigma is a very strong word with very strong connotations, so make sure you use it wisely.
In this lesson, we’ll teach you 11 Business English terms you need to know to talk about failure.
A few words we’ll talk about are:
- to tank
- to fold
- to throw in the towel
Here’s the episode audio.
To get our episodes for free, you can also subscribe to the Smart Startup English podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud and Spotify.
If you want to keep practicing the words you’ve learned in this lesson, sign up below to get the episode transcript for free. We’ll also let you know when we release new episodes, and we’ll give you access to ten free Business English audio lessons and worksheets.
You can find Smart Startup English on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook.
Image credits: Cindy Tang via Unsplash
