FailCon brings together successful founders, investors, designers, and developers to discuss their mistakes and missteps, what they learned, and how they avoid it now.
We need your help choosing the final founders to give lightning talks. Who do you want to see?
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182 votes
Phil Libin, Founder of Evernote
Funding Mistakes and Quick Recoveries
A $10mm funding deal fell through on the day of closing and they were rescued by a random offer of money from a fan in Sweden at 3am that night, which lasted exactly long enough to get back on their feet and secure a real round.
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129 votes
Mike Greenfield; CTO of Circle of Moms
Mike will talk about how his team pivoted from their original idea to build Circle of Moms into the largest property for moms on the Internet in under one year.
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80 votes
Mark Goldenson; CEO of Breakthrough
Five Ways to Fuck Up: Uncommon Lessons on Fundraising, Marketing, and Development
Advice is thrown liberally around the Valley. This talk avoids the true but cliche - "hire strong", "release early and often" - to expose uncommon lessons from a failed startup. Mark Goldenson i... more
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31 votes
Salim Ismail, The Falling of PubSub.com
The failure of pubsub.com, which was a precedent to twitter doing full real-time search in 2005. An early member tanked the company by doing a full public dirt-dishing. It’s used by PR folks as an example of crisis mgmt.
The two lessons are how to carefully split equity at the beginning and h... more -
17 votes
Amelia Thorton; President of The Thorton Group
Understanding and Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team
In this session you will learn about the Five Dysfunctions (traps) that keep teams from being as effective as they need to be, and what the leader’s role is in overcoming.
The Five Dysfunctions are:
1. Absence of Trust
2. ... more -
4 votes
Chris Aarons, Ivy Worldwide
Chris compares the mistakes made and lessons learned between their poorer Vista Launch campaign and successful 31 Days of the Dragon HP campaign. Lessons include:
-- Undue focus on launch timeframe
-- Fear of truly ceding control to the community
-- Repurposing influencer-generated content to drive sales:
