10,000 Ways That Won’t Work
Why I named my company after failure
When people ask about the name “10000 WAYS,” I tell them it comes from the Edison quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Most people nod politely. Some think it’s cute. But for me, it’s not a motivational poster — it’s a job description.
I spent nearly nine years building RadiSurf, a nanotechnology company we spun out of Aarhus University in 2015. In those nine years, I found hundreds of ways that didn’t work. Products that customers didn’t want. Funding applications that got rejected. Partnerships that fell apart. Pricing models that made no sense. Hiring decisions I’d undo if I could. Patent strategies that cost too much and protected too little. Trade shows where nobody stopped at our booth.
The thing nobody tells you about building a deep-tech startup is that the technology is usually the easy part. The hard part is everything else — and “everything else” is where most of the 10,000 failed attempts happen.
The myth of the brilliant pivot
There’s a popular narrative in startup culture about the “pivot” — that magical moment where the founder sees the light, changes direction, and suddenly everything works. It makes for a great story. It’s also mostly fiction.
What actually happens is more like this: you try something. It doesn’t work. You try a variation. That doesn’t work either. You talk to a customer who gives you an idea. You try that. It half-works. You iterate. You talk to more customers. You adjust. You fail again. You adjust again. Slowly — painfully slowly — you converge on something that works. Not because you had a flash of insight, but because you systematically eliminated the things that didn’t work.
At RadiSurf, our technology was genuinely novel — polymer brush coatings that could make incompatible materials bond at the molecular level. Think of it as nano-Velcro. The science was sound from day one. But finding the right market, the right application, the right price point, the right way to explain it to a manufacturing engineer who just wants to glue two things together — that took years of trial and error.
Why failure matters more than success
I’m now at a point in my career where I run one company (Redox-Flow), co-founded another (Decameal), invest in several more, and advise founders through 10000 WAYS ApS. And the most valuable thing I bring to every conversation isn’t my PhD, my Harvard education, or my exit experience. It’s my catalogue of failures.
When a founder tells me they’re planning to apply for EIC Accelerator funding, I can tell them exactly which mistakes to avoid — because I made most of them myself before we eventually won the grant (one of only 119 selected from 2,130 applicants). When someone asks about patent strategy, I can explain which of our six patents actually mattered and which ones we probably shouldn’t have filed. When a deep-tech CEO is struggling with B2B sales, I know how it feels because I’ve sat in those meetings where the technology is brilliant and the customer still says no.
Failure is only wasted if you don’t learn from it. And it’s doubly wasted if you keep the lessons to yourself.
The 10,001st way
The name “10000 WAYS” is deliberately incomplete. Edison didn’t stop at 10,000 failed attempts — he kept going until he found the one that worked. The whole point of the 10,000 ways that don’t work is that they bring you closer to the one that does.
That’s the mindset I try to bring to everything I do. It’s not optimism — I’m actually quite impatient and direct (my DiSC profile is firmly in the “D” quadrant, which is a polite way of saying I don’t enjoy small talk and I’d rather be doing something than talking about doing something). It’s more like stubbornness with a system.
You try. You fail. You learn. You try again. The only real failure is stopping.
That’s what 10,000 WAYS is about. Not the failures themselves, but the refusal to let them be the end of the story.
Mikkel Kongsfelt is a scientist turned entrepreneur based in Odder, Denmark. He is CEO & Co-Owner of Redox-Flow, Co-Founder of Decameal, and angel investor in deep-tech and food-tech startups. He advises founders on strategy, IP, and fundraising through 10000 WAYS ApS.