By Julie Blaustein

Max Levchin of Slide Speaks of his Failures

SnapSummit: FailCon was held at the popular Kabuki Hotel this week. I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical when I learned there was going to be an entire conference devoted to the failure of one’s company.  Instead, SnapSummit: FailCon not only succeeded in bringing in otherwise successful founders and entrepreneurs such as Pay Pal’s co-founder and now CEO & Founder of Slide, Max Levchin to talk about their failures, but it also packed the house with over 340 attendees.

What motivated folks to attend such a conference?  Shalyn Hockey, VP of Operations at Assetmap is fresh out of Northwestern University. She attended the conference mainly to better understand what will actually work for a start up  – the best business models, the infrastructure and to get ideas so that she won’t fail. After the conference I had a chance to catch up with her regarding her thoughts about the conference:

As a young, fresh off-the-boat entrepreneur, there was clear value in listening to 25 seasoned entrepreneurs bravely share their experiences of failures. It was useful to hear how people made failure work for them, but more importantly I appreciated how FailCon showed something beyond how to turn failure into success…although there is clearly a huge amount of grey area determining what ideas will be successes and failures, in part failure can be more predictable than success.  It’s just a matter of knowing the variables.

Speakers were open and transparent when sharing their lessons learned. Eric Marcoullier, Formerly of MyBloglog and now Co-Founder & CEO of Gnip shared his harrowing saga of the almost failure of his company. When he recognized that his start up was going to fail due to infrastructure issues, he told his VC’s that he needed to quit but then quickly came back with a solution. He had to start over and to do so he had to fire 7 of his 12 employees and had to start over practically from scratch. I hope all VC’s are so understanding.

It was a great agenda with a mix of speakers including Founders such as Meebo’s Seth Sternberg & Sandy Jen, Developer’s Dave McClure 0f 5000 Hats and Kevin Barenblatt of Context Optional and  VC’s Christine Herron of First Round Capital and David Hornik of August Capital. Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga had the room in stitches with his story about his first investors – BestBuy and Target credit cards. The demo room had about 12 vendors that were busy with traffic throughout the day – not always the case at conferences. I spoke with Gleb Budman, CEO & Founder of BackBlaze, a product that will back up your entire computer before its needed such as if coffee suddenly spills on it. They provide over 3 PB (1 petabyte is equal to a thousand terabytes). To put it in perspective, Facebook uses about 1/2 a PB for all of the pictures on their site. Gleb found the companies present at FailCon to be perfect for the type of product he sells and it was apparent by the traffic at his booth. Cassie Phillips, producer of the conference should be recognized for running with the idea of FailCon despite hitting some major objections especially with Sponsors who questioned being associated with “failure.”  There is additional great press about the conference. Also, check out more buzz about the conference on its Twitter #FAILCON page.

Pictures from SnapSummit: FailCon by Julie Blaustein

Cassie Phillips, Producer of FailCon

Lynn Johnson of Fast Company Providing Opening Remarks

Seth Sternberg & Sandy Jen: Founders of Meebo

Christine Herron of First Round Capital and David Hornik of August Capital

Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga

Eric Marcoullier, CEO and Founder of Gnip

How NOT to Build Social Apps

Shalyn Hockey of AssetMap Seeks to Avoid Failure

It’s been confirmed that Slide has let go a substantial portion of its sales force earlier this week. The media-sharing service that gained a great deal of popularity as a social networking application provider has shifted its strategy for generating revenue, focusing on premium advertising. The result is that Slide has had to let go of most of its ad sales force.

As VentureBeat notes, slide is reportedly making about $20 million per year based on ads, and has raised over $600 million in venture capital. Constantly competing with similar services such as RockYou, Slide was really able to make a name for itself once social networks began opening their platforms, enabling Slide’s widgets to become better integrated and eventually evolve into full-on applications.

Having created some of Facebook’s top applications including Super Poke, Slide has established itself as a company able to weather the woes of a constantly changing attitude towards widgets, applications, and integrated media-sharing services. What Slide has not been able to weather, however, is the changing market when it comes to advertising and its subsequent budget.

The economy has had an affect on most web-based startups, trickling down from decreased venture capital spending to the deterrence of copycat sites and other projects with large cost requirements. Between these two factors, there has been a rather noticeable shift in the way in which advertisers approach social media marketing, with many looking for deeper engagement with lower costs. Essentially relying on users to do the talking (passive or otherwise), online marketing campaigns have turned to applications as an alternative solution.

That leaves Slide in an interesting situation, as it’s counted on advertising for its revenue until now, though the company is in a good position for shifting gears and focusing on app-related advertising. With options such as brand-sponsored apps, the need for a large sales force is diminished. As we’ve seen with companies such as Buddy Media the ability to provide a web-based portal for analytics, metrics and overall management can also help curb costs on the customer service end. The result is a more direct manner in which brands can utilize the apps powered by and distributed through third parties, lowering costs for them and ultimately cutting overhead for Slide.