RegHero: Failure Is the Mother of Success
Behind every celebrated startup story lies a quieter reality: most ventures don’t succeed. Venture-backed companies fail at rates estimated between 65% and 75%. Yet the stories we celebrate—the IPOs, the unicorns, the billion-dollar exits—tend to obscure the far more common experience of struggle, missteps, and eventual closure.
At Mother of Success, we believe those untold stories matter. They matter because failure isn’t the end. It’s a beginning. It’s where resilience is forged, where lessons take shape, and where the seeds of future success are planted.
This publication is our attempt to bring those stories into the light. To speak openly about what founders rarely admit in public. To reframe failure not as shame but as wisdom. And to start, I want to tell you my own story.
Our Leap into the Unknown
In 2023, my husband and I started RegHero, an AI-powered platform for FDA 510(k) medical device regulatory intelligence.
The idea was simple and blunt: large language models were suddenly capable of handling massive volumes of text, and regulatory affairs was one of the most text-heavy, complex, and under-innovated industries in the world. My background was at Apple’s ML Data Platform; his was in biomedical engineering. Between us, we had the skills to build something ambitious.
We envisioned a system that could analyze thousands of FDA device clearances, parse adverse events, and surface insights for medical device startups who couldn’t afford armies of consultants. In short, we wanted to help founders get through the 510(k) regulatory process—faster, cheaper, safer.
And so we began. Nights and weekends, then full-time. We scraped and processed 170,000 devices. We built predicate search tools, integrated adverse event databases, and launched a sleek, self-serve subscription platform. Our pitch was bold: “Accelerate your FDA submission by 70%.”
We even found early traction. Over two dozen medtech and regulatory teams across the U.S., Canada, Singapore, and Turkey tried our tools. We partnered with consultancies, spoke at conferences, and even co-authored research with academic labs. For a moment, it felt like we were flying.
The Cracks Beneath the Surface
But behind the surface, there were cracks.
1. Free users, no paying customers.
I was afraid of charging. Afraid of scaring people away. So I offered long “beta programs,” telling myself that feedback was just as valuable as revenue. But free users are not customers. Without money exchanged, demand was impossible to measure. And when the time came to ask for payment, most quietly slipped away.
2. A mismatch in time.
Startups live by the hour. Cash burn ticks away like a metronome. But medtech consultancies move by the year. Decisions that felt urgent to us were low priority to them. Their silence stretched for weeks. Our desperation mounted by days.
3. The emotional toll of co-founding with a spouse.
Being married and being business partners blurred every boundary. Every user call, every invoice, every bug fix followed us home. “Pressure warps us both,” I once wrote in my journal. It was true.
4. Market limits.
Even when the product worked, even when users praised the design and accuracy, a larger truth remained: the medtech regulatory software space simply wasn’t big enough for venture-scale growth. The total addressable market was measured in billions, not tens of billions. We had built something good, but not something fundable at scale.
By 2025, after two years of building, shipping, and hoping, we made the decision no founder wants to make: we shut it down.
The Reality Few Talk About
When startups fail, the explanations often sound clean and tidy: “We didn’t find product–market fit.” “The market wasn’t ready.” “We decided to pivot.”
The reality is messier. Failure looks like:
An angel investor asking, “Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?” before taking you seriously.
A competitor dismissing your pricing with, “ChatGPT is only twenty dollars a month.”
Customers giving glowing feedback but never pulling out a credit card.
A lawyer billing you $7,500 for work you thought would cost a fraction of that.
Refreshing your inbox for weeks, waiting for a reply that never comes.
Arguing with the person you love most because your company’s runway has become your marriage’s runway.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not the kind of story you read in TechCrunch. But it’s real.
And that’s why I’m writing this.
Why We Need to Talk About Failure
Because if founders only hear about unicorns, they’ll think failure is a personal defect instead of a structural reality. Because most of us will fail—and yet, those failures are where the most useful lessons are forged.
Failure teaches you things no accelerator curriculum can:
That charging money early matters more than perfect design.
That customers buy outcomes, not technology.
That resilience is not about pretending you’re okay but about finding the courage to start again.
As I wrote in my memoir Flying Kite:
“Failure is not something to be ashamed of. Life sometimes reaches out to pull you up when you’re at your lowest and gently pushes open a new door.”
For me, that door opened in art, writing, and now in launching Mother of Success.
The Mission of Mother of Success
This publication is dedicated to making failure visible.
Each month, we’ll publish in-depth founder interviews:
Entrepreneurs who shut down companies after years of effort.
Founders who walked away from funding they no longer believed in.
Teams that pivoted after running headfirst into a wall.
We won’t glorify failure. But we will document it honestly. Because behind the numbers, behind the “65–75% failure rate,” are human beings with stories worth telling.
Our goal is simple: to turn those stories into wisdom for the next generation of builders.
Because in truth, failure is not the opposite of success.
It is its mother.
👉 If you’re a founder who has shut down a company, pivoted, or want to share lessons from your journey, we’d love to hear from you. Write to us, and let’s make your story visible.