The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger
Track the failures between your highlights so setbacks read as moments, not verdicts
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 86%
Careers get told as an A-side — the highlight reel that impresses people and opens doors. The B-side (firings, visa losses, dropouts, depression, dead bets) gets buried, which makes everyone else's B moments feel terminal. The framework is to deliberately keep and periodically tell both sides, and to explicitly label your current low point as a moment rather than a state.
Origin
Gina Gotthilf's opening keynote at Latitud's 5,000-person Latin America startup conference; she borrows the A-side/B-side metaphor from vinyl records and mixtapes, and applies it both to personal careers and to how a region (Latin America) is narrated.
Core principles
- 01The public version of any career is the Instagram version — highlights only.
- 02B moments are frequent and normal; hiding them makes others think they alone are failing.
- 03Naming a bad stretch as a 'moment' converts it from identity to phase.
- 04Careers are far longer than they feel at 26 — there is enough runway for multiple identities.
- 05Storytelling ability is part of the skill: what you did matters less than whether people can perceive its value.
How to run it
- 1
Write out your A-side honestly
List the credentials, logos, and outcomes you actually lead with — the things that impress and open doors. Accept that they are real and useful, not fake.
Pro tip Notice which A-side items exist purely as social proof versus which taught you a durable skill.
- 2
Reconstruct the B-side between every A-side entry
For each highlight, write down what was happening immediately before and after it: rejections, firings, months unpaid, projects that died. Gotthilf's list included dropping out of college from depression, two lost visas, two layoffs, one firing, and six unpaid months at Tumblr.
Pro tip Date them. Seeing that B moments cluster right before A moments reframes them as inputs, not detours.
Watch out Do not retro-fit a tidy 'it all made sense' narrative — she explicitly rejects that; she was miserable and saw no path forward at the time.
- 3
Label your current position as a moment
When in a low stretch, state explicitly: this is a B moment, not a permanent condition. The failure mode is concluding 'things are just not going to work out for us' because you cannot see it as bounded.
- 4
Tell both sides publicly, at least sometimes
When you have a stage, a podcast, or a team meeting, deliberately spend part of it on B-side stories. It is what lets other people calibrate their own trajectory against reality instead of against the highlight reel.
Pro tip Concrete and slightly absurd B stories land better than abstract 'I've had failures too' humility.
- 5
Apply the same ledger to your company, product, or region
The pattern generalizes: Latin America's B-side (instability, weak governments, danger) is what everyone sees; its A-side is that tech occupies roughly one-third of India's share of GDP, one-tenth of China's, one-thirteenth of the US's — meaning enormous headroom. Same for a company mid-plateau.
In the wild
Gotthilf dropped out of Reed College while severely depressed, was told by a college counselor she had nothing to show for her life, applied to 100 companies and heard back from almost none, lost her visa twice, was laid off twice and fired once, and went six months unpaid at Tumblr before it sold to Yahoo and she was laid off again.
→ She then started an agency helping US tech startups grow in Latin America, was recruited by a then-unknown Duolingo, and helped scale it from 3 million to over 200 million users.
Rather than open her conference on the region's instability, she reframed the region using its tech-share-of-GDP gap versus India, China, and the US, arguing the gap is the size of the opportunity, not the size of the failure.
→ The talk opened a 5,000-person, 70-speaker conference whose stated purpose was sharing failures so founders could skip repeating them.
Common mistakes
Treating a B moment as a permanent identity
The specific harm is not the setback but the conclusion drawn from it — 'no one's going to hire me, I've been fired and laid off so many times.' Recognizing it as a moment is the entire intervention.
Doing the work but never learning to tell the story
Gotthilf was an overachiever with three high-school diplomas and still got asked what she had done with her life. Value that cannot be perceived by others does not convert into opportunity.
Sanitizing your B-side when you finally get a platform
Only telling A-side stories on stage propagates the distortion that made your own low points feel abnormal.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early- to mid-career operators and founders in a visible failure stretch — fired, laid off, a dead startup, a plateaued product — who are concluding the trajectory is over
Not ideal for
Situations that need a concrete tactical fix rather than a reframe; this does not diagnose why something failed
From the transcript
“we are very encouraged in our lives especially professionally to talk about our as sides all the time because that's what impresses people”
“it's easy to think that things are just not going to work out for us because we're in one of those be moments if we…”
“it's not just about doing things that actually matter and like and and learning it's about being able to tell a story and it's about…”
From the episode
Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene
Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo)