Tech loves failure so much, SF is getting a museum devoted to it

Through maxims like “embrace failure” and “fail fast,” Silicon Valley turned effing up into dogma. So there’s no better place to build a temple to failure than San Francisco, a city built on booms and busts.

In March, Pier 39 is set to welcome the Museum of Failure, a compendium of capitalism’s oddest blunders, from Colgate’s beef lasagna to the Ford Edsel to the rebellion-scented Harley-Davidson perfume. The 10,000-square-foot traveling pop-up will take over the former Madame Tussauds for at least a few months, replacing the wax figures with more than 150 marketing missteps that might have been ingenious except for their stupidity.

The museum is meant to highlight the role of failure in the creative process, while revisiting hilarious debacles like that $400 fruit-squeezing contraption, the Juicero. Some of the fiascoes it features, like the sinking of the Titanic and the soon-to-return Fyre Festival, are well-known. But others — like Google Glass, Crystal Pepsi, and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe — are sliding into oblivion. A visit to the museum will teach you that yes, there really was a weight-loss chocolate available in the 1980s called “Ayds.”

And because so many of these flops were hawked on late-night TV, the museum pairs the products with their commercials. 

“My favorite is the golf club that has a cup on the top, so when you’re out on the course with the guys, you could pee into the golf club,” said Martin Biallas, CEO of SEE Global Entertainment, which has brought the Museum of Failure to cities around the world for months-long stints. “It even has a privacy towel. You gotta see that commercial.”

While the museum will be open for all ages, there’s an 18-and-over section that contains dubiously sexy items like the spray-on condom and a rental sex doll. There’s also an area dedicated to President Donald Trump. “Steaks, his board game, the university — there’s like 10 products,” Biallas said. “People say, ‘Is that too political?’ But I left it in there. He failed!”

Since Big Tech created some of the most phenomenally expensive oopsies — the Microsoft Zune, the BlackBerry Storm — it makes sense to bring the museum to Silicon Valley’s backyard, Biallas said. And whether it’s a true failure or just a car that people love to hate, there will be a Cybertruck.

Before getting into the failure racket, Biallas worked in the music business, managing tours for megastars like Tina Turner and Duran Duran. He got into odd museums in the ’90s, first developing “Star Trek” exhibitions, then partnering with James Cameron to create a “Titanic”-themed attraction. 

One of Biallas’ personal failures was the short-lived and ill-conceived Disgusting Food Museum in Las Vegas, which used barf bags for tickets and went bust because the cost of flying in “gross” food — which is to say, regional delicacies that were unfamiliar to most American palates — from around the world proved too costly. That aside, Biallas considers his life mostly failure-free. “Even my marriage is great,” he said.

Confronting a litany of failures in a museum setting is cathartic, he believes, because fear of failure is a driver of human history. Visitors to the museum come away with a sense that if big corporations slip on the occasional banana peel, we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves for our goofs — unless, in the case of the Fyre Festival, the schadenfreude is just too tempting. After all, to err is human. To gawk at other people’s colossal screw-ups, divine.