What Lisbon’s Rebuilding Teaches About Starting Again After Failure

In a recent LinkedIn post, Simon Squibb discusses what Lisbon’s rebuilding after the 1755 earthquake can suggest about recovering from failure. This article reports on Squibb’s reflections in that post; it is not written by him. He connects the city’s reconstruction with his own setbacks in business and entrepreneurship support.

“They rebuilt it instead. Laid it out on a grid, designed the buildings to survive the next one, and cities around the world ended up copying how they did it.”

Rebuilding after disaster

Squibb recounts how an earthquake, tsunami and fires devastated Lisbon in 1755. He says people who believed the disaster was divine punishment or saw the city as cursed might have considered abandoning the site. Instead, he points to the decision to rebuild with a grid plan and structures designed to withstand future earthquakes.

In Squibb’s telling, that choice changed the meaning of the destruction: the city’s ruins became the starting point for a different kind of urban design. He uses the example to frame recovery as an act of construction, rather than simply a return to what existed before.

Connecting the city’s story to business setbacks

Squibb then turns from Lisbon to his own experience, describing businesses that failed despite years of effort and earlier attempts to offer free help to entrepreneurs. He presents Dream Group as a project that followed those unsuccessful efforts.

“Dream Group is the version that works, and it only exists because the others didn’t.”

According to Squibb, the current project is linked to what came before it, including the attempts that did not succeed. His post does not offer a detailed account of those ventures; instead, he uses them to illustrate how a later effort can emerge from prior setbacks.

Failure as a prompt to build

Squibb is careful to distinguish his argument from celebrating failure. He acknowledges that people do not seek it out, while arguing that setbacks can leave room for new work. The emphasis is on what someone chooses to make after a loss, not on the loss itself.

“I’m not telling you to want failure. Nobody wants it. But when it turns up, and it will, the question isn’t whether you survived it. It’s what you build on the ground it cleared.”

That framing gives the Lisbon analogy its central point: rebuilding can mean designing for a different future, whether for a city or a business. Squibb closes by inviting readers to see what remains after failure as potential, echoing the reconstruction story he began with.

A metaphor grounded in experience

In Squibb’s view, Lisbon’s history and his entrepreneurial path share a pattern: destruction does not determine what follows. His post offers no guarantee that a new venture will work, but it argues that a failed attempt need not be the final chapter. The idea is less that rubble is welcome than that it can become the ground for something new.