Today’s episode is a disappointment.

We had hoped our guest would regale us with tales of woe, be they missed opportunities, squandered funds, or fickle investors. But no, not today. Sebastien Mannai’s story was clean. Squeaky clean. There are no failures in his wake. Not yet, at least.

To be fair, Sebastien has just started. His company, ADS, is in oil & gas, and it plans to bring oil wells into the 21st century.

Visit an oil field, today, and if you wait long enough a technician will stop by in a beat-up old pickup truck and check each well to see if it’s still pumping. Sebastien and ADS think that acoustic sensors are a better answer. Affix one to each well, and connect it to the internet. Add a touch of signal processing and, voila, you can detect pump failures remotely. For those of a certain age, the technician might start to feel a little like the Maytag repairman of yore.

Failures for Sebastien? Not yet. And, for his sake, hopefully never. But, for the team from Failure - the Podcast … well, let’s just say that we hope to have Sebastien back in a few years.

So if you are searching for schadenfreude, today’s episode might disappoint. You can take solace, nonetheless, in our failure to find failure. With gridlock in Washington D.C., global temperatures rising, and the NFL scrambling to rework the rules for instant replays, maybe that’s the kind of solace you can relish. It’s like puppies and rainbows.