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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