Posts Tagged ‘FailCon’

On Monday, we got to take a look at the 13 new companies who participated in FailCon’s SuccessCon-Test 2010, a chance for entrepreneurs to pitch their products to over 450 investors, developers, designers and service providers who attended the FailCon conference in San Francisco. At the end of the day, the three who were voted most likely to succeed, or perhaps least likely to fail, got to take the main stage for a final presentation, the highlights of which you can see in the video above. We never set our expectations too high for demos, so we were pretty excited when we saw some services we might actually use. The winners were Card Munch, a mobile business card transcription service, Mogo Tix, a mobile ticketing service, and My Next Customer, an integrated sales and marketing service for tracking social, SEO, phone and other offline media. Show of hands: who plans to check these guys out? Oops, we can’t see you. But you can let us know what you think by taking our poll. Just click on the button below.

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UPDATE: The results are in: Card Munch got 100% of the vote. Happy scanning, voters.

“Every startup will encounter a failure, said Cass Phillips, executive producer of FailCon2010. Not a close-up-shop-and-file-for-bankruptcy kind of failure, but more like turning in a rough draft of an essay that has to be completely rewritten. On Monday mbStartups flew to San Francisco for an all-day event of panel discussions, small group workshops and networking sessions with the founders (and funders) of successful startups who were once failures. We learned three things about hitting the delete button and starting over:

1. A mistaken hypothesis does not, in fact, create a crisis.

Steve Blank (pictured left), author of The 4 Steps to the Epiphany said that startups don’t need to “fire an executive every time there is a flaw in the business model.” Large companies thrive on executing existing business models that have already proven to work. “Startups,” in contrast, are “built for rapid search and pivots,” said Blank, meaning that the goal of a startup is to quickly test and rule out business models that don’t work before settling on one that does.

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Want to be a success? Then you’ve got to learn how to fail. At least that was the mantra at the second annual FailCon, which brought together 400 entrepreneurs in San Francisco to learn from their startup failures.

The day-long show featured panel discussions and smaller discussion groups where entrepreneurs recounted their failures and how they learned from them.

“It’s not simply that failure helps you learn. It also makes you stronger,” said panelist and investor Esther Dyson of EDventure. “Once you’ve failed and come back from it, you’ll never have that fear of trying something new again.”

Other advice given included:

• Learn to recognize if your business is failing. Often times executives can be too close to the problem to notice it, according Dyson.
• Practice integrity, and fail gracefully. Don’t sign long-term deals if you know you’re going out of business in a couple of days, and don’t borrow money if it won’t help anything, said Guy Hirsch, CEO of recruiting firm SayHired.
• When angling for a last-minute buyout, hold your cards close, according to Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures. One of his entrepreneurs accidentally let slip how much cash his startup had left, so the buyer just waited until the company failed and bought it out at 1/10th the price.
• Keep healthy personal finance habits. Kumar said he usually looks at how an entrepreneur handles their personal finances to get a sense of the state of how a startup handles money.