Years ago, someone broke into my home and stole my laptops while I lay in bed upstairs. I had left them out on the dining table, and the burglar broke their way into my back garden and smashed through one of my rear windows with a brick. This was Oxford in the winter, and I had a hard plastic sheet screwed into the windowframe in lieu of real double glazing. Undeterred, they smashed and smashed until they found their way through. They didn't take my DSLR camera, which was also on the table; they didn't take my microphone, which I'd been using to record a video. They swiped the laptops, which were my livelihood, and fled.

Soon afterwards, we installed motion sensitive lights. If someone was going to enter my back garden in the middle of the night again, they would trigger the sensor and be flooded in bright white light. I couldn't afford to let this happen again.

As it turned out, the light was sensitive enough to be triggered by anything that walked through my garden. Intruders, for sure, although there never were any more. But also cats, and foxes, and hedgehogs.

Every single night, the light would click on. And every single night, I'd sit bolt upright and go to the window, my heart racing. The burglary was still in my blood, and in the air. My home, which had been a safe space, now just felt like four walls in the dirt.

Over ten years later, the sound of that brick breaking through glass is no longer ringing in my ears. Home feels safe. I've let go of the intrusion.

In my career, there have been events that felt like that break-in. The moment I decided to leave Elgg. Matter failing to raise its Fund III. And others. Each one, a brick through my window.

Everything is learning. You put up your psychological light for next time, so you can see it coming and hopefully avoid making the worst of the mistakes again. If you take the right lessons and approach each event with a learning mindset, each mistake becomes constructive growth. However unintentional your failure might have been, you fail forward towards something better and new.

Not everything that triggers your psychological light is a mistake that should lead to you sitting bolt upright with your adrenaline pumping. It's easy to be oversensitive to things that seem like they might turn into red flags. They could just as easily not, and it's important to stay open to new experiences. That's learning, too.

And over time, you have to let it go. Months later, I still find myself spending more cycles than I should thinking about Matter. That's a sign of my love for it: it was one of the most fulfilling, meaningful things I've ever done. It allowed me to use all of my skills and empathy in service of a mission-driven community that was genuinely trying to make the world more inclusive and democratic. I hope, one day, I will get to do work like that again. But while it was sad - and I'm still sad - I won't let that sadness own me.

These days, I'm doing super-interesting work at Unlock, and I'm still a part of Matter's community of alumni (after all, I went through the accelerator as a founder before I worked for it). Honestly, I'm very excited to have crossed back over the table to build mission-driven products again. It's a new approach to helping creators make money from their work, and it has the potential to change the entire web.

Done right, failure builds immunity. I know why each failure happened. I'm stronger for the experience. And I can bring that experience to help make Unlock - and everything I do in my career - as strong as possible. Rather than letting a brick through the window transform the safety of my home into flimsy walls in dirt, I can build a more resilient home. Failure isn't an excuse to turn inwards and stay low. It's a reason to be proud and build high. I've got the tools, and the energy, and the motivation. Not from a place of naïvety, but a place of knowledge and power.