THE FAILURE FETISH has deep roots. Willingness to start over after a flop has long been considered a requirement for healthy startup ecosystems, and part of the inventors’ myth (Thomas Edison didn’t come up with the lightbulb on his first try, after all). Unlike regular small businesses, “startups” are often trying new business models with new technology, making it harder to anticipate fatal flaws. While estimates of failure rates vary, they’re all high—so statistically, lots of fizzling must be an indication that someone’s making it somewhere. “Silicon Valley is the startup failure capital of the world as well as the startup success capital of the world,” Palo Alto venture capitalist Peter Currie says.

Nascent startup hubs in more conservative parts of the country could use more tolerance for things not working out. (In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for example, the collapse of a telecommunications company backed by many local investors has made the town incredibly leery of supporting new tech businesses.) But in the Valley, the appreciation for quitters is getting out of control: The reverence of failure is starting to rival that of success. One respected startup accelerator even calls itself a “fail factory.” It’s a cheery new spin on not succeeding: The more you fail, the more you learn, thereby increasing your chances of hitting the jackpot in the future. Like the kid who built sixteen lousy Facebook apps before creating Mafia Wars.

The increasing appetite for failure fits this historical moment, when startups are the new rock bands: More inexperienced people are building businesses, and not necessarily because they’ve all hit on bankable ideas. Startup communities aren’t good at weeding out dumb concepts before someone invests time and money in them, because success can be unpredictable—who’d have thought Instagram would sell for a billion dollars?—and there’s no downside to cheerleading from the sidelines. Failure can also be less painful, since it costs so much less to start a business now than it used to; newbies can afford to use them as a training ground, and investors sometimes use them as market research. With a failure boom on the horizon, de-stigmatizing the practice becomes a pre-emptive psychological defense mechanism.

It’s even gotten to the point where a failure on your resume is more of a badge of honor than a black mark. One attempt is usually considered better than no experience at all—and maybe even as valuable as a win, if you buy Bill Gates’ opinion that success has its downsides as well. That’s great for the founders, who can fail and get a second chance, or a third or a fourth. But it sucks for the all the people they hired, who may have to go without income while they find another job (engineers are usually picked up quickly, but non-technical staff can have more trouble).