With the roaring success of FailCon 2009, we’ve decided to start a small series of FailChats throughout 2010, leading up to the main event: FailCon 2010!

Our first chat features entrepreneurs who have guided a company through a pivot: drastically changing business plans, products, marketing angles, and more.  It can be an unnerving process, accepting the beat you don’t know instead of the one you do, but – if executed properly at the right time – can make all the difference in the world.

Seating is EXTREMELY limited, so nab a spot at:
http://thepivot.eventbrite.com

Speakers Include:

MODERATOR: Han Pham; Founder, ResetGo

Ethan Bloch; Founder, Flowtown

Vivek Sodera; Founder, RapLeaf

DL: What was Kiko’s biggest failure? And biggest success?
JK: Biggest failure: Focus. My cofounder, Emmett Shear, and I were constantly thinking of ideas for new products that weren’t remotely related to web calendars and building prototypes of them, only to lose focus a few weeks later and try something else. Creativity is important, especially in entrepreneurship, but it would have been better had we focused it on solving one problem. It probably didn’t help that neither of us used or liked to use a calendar at the time.

Biggest success: While I think it was pretty nifty that the first version of Kiko was one of the first AJAX enabled web applications, I think our biggest success was how much Emmett and I learned over the 14 months we were working on it. Specifically, how to raise money, hire first employees and recruit talent, operate a web site, and other basic skills that most tech entrepreneurs probably take for granted. When we started Kiko, we were just out of undergrad, and really didn’t know anything about the industry or startups at all. Perhaps it’s a bit telling how green we were that our biggest success was essentially learning about failing so that we could go on to Justin.tv. (more…)

DL: What has been Photojojo’s biggest failure? Biggest success to date?
AG: Mother’s day 2007, we screwed up. Big time.

We had these brand new customizable photo bags we were gonna put up for sale. They looked beautiful, and you could upload any photo to have it baked into the fabric with heat. High quality finish, for $100+. It was perfect for moms, so we scrambled to get it up fast so our customers could order them for Mother’s day delivery (the bags take a couple weeks to create.)

We stayed up all night, but we got it done. And aside from a few early glitches, it worked! The orders came in, and people started writing in to tell us how excited they were to be getting a custom bag. It went on like this for a couple weeks before we found out. Almost a third of our orders had never gone into manufacturing. A technical glitch had prevented us from seeing them, and with a week left until M-Day, it was impossible to get to deliver on our customers’ promises. We were about to have a bunch of very angry customers (and moms!) on our hands. I didn’t know what to do.

I made calls to find out if there was any way we could get the bags done faster. There wasn’t. I went back through our systems to see if we were reading them wrong. We weren’t. (more…)

This an amazing post recognizing why failure is frequently the necessary, especially the field of tech.  Every startup founder and developer knows the feelings of failure; and if they haven’t they will.  The point isn’t to avoid failure, but to embrace it, to learn from it, and to apply what you have gained to your next venture.

As this article mentions (from a study of med students and their success rates), those who claim they made no mistakes, or that problems were outside of their control are rarely the ones who succeed.  It’s those students who recognize their errors, analyze them, and confidently move past them who graduate with honors and appear to find the highest levels of success.  Take that to heart.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001297.html

We’ve got an Afterparty!

We’ve decided to announce the new SFbeta season with FailCon, and have our first SFbeta of the fiscal year as the after party!

What does this mean for attendees? Why, your FailCon pass gets you into SFbeta that night, a $25 value! Or if you buy a pass to SFbeta now, and decide to go to FailCon later? Why, we reimburse you the cost!

This is going to be most rocking after-party ever! We’re back at our home at 111 Minna, and plan to draw 350+ of the smartest and most active entrepreneurs, investors, bloggers, and marketers on the web to a night of networking, drinking, and great fun. We truly hope to see you there!

Just got off the phone with Jessica Vascellaro, who has agreed to interview Max Levchin for FailCon. I’m excited to get a great Wall Street Journal writer on board for this event.

We chatted about insuring the interview stays fresh and relevant, that failures aren’t pussy-footed around and mistakes aren’t avoided. Jessica sounds like she is on the same wave-length: we want new stories and nitty gritty details. We aren’t going to learn from sweeping generalizations, we’re going to learn from the specifics.

This is one of our keynote addresses, and it looks to be awesome!

So I try to keep tabs on all the conferences going on in the city (as you’ll know if you get our mailings).  I have found that GigaOm and their team continues to produce some highly technical and specific, but alla round awesome and informative events.  The topics aren’t always for the beginners in the field, but for those of you in the know, even you’ll walk away learning something new.

Structure 09, their Cloud Computing Conference, is coming up on June 25th, and they’ve offered my readers and attendees a special 10% discount.  Woot! (You can click the link to get it.)  It’s taking place at the beautiful and recently renovated Mission Bay Conference Center.  This is definitely not an event to miss.

Here’s what they say about it, in their own words:

**Come hear the biggest players in the cloud computing industry**
For our second annual event, we bring out the industry’s biggest influencers to help clarify the present situation and investigate the evolution of the cloud computing ecosystem. The event is produced by Om Malik of GigaOM, who has covered cloud computing from the beginning. We don’t just talk about cloud computing once a year; it’s a part of our ongoing editorial coverage on GigaOM every day. Attend Structure 09 and be part of the conversation.

MEET OUR THOUGHT LEADERS
All of the key influencers in cloud computing and the web infrastructure industry will be on hand to discuss the future of the business.

Keynote Speakers
* Marc Benioff – Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com
* Paul Sagan – President and CEO, Akamai

Speaker Lineup includes
* Werner Vogels – VP and CTO, Amazon
* Greg Papadopoulos – CTO and EVP – Research and Development, Sun Microsystems
* Russ Daniels – VP and CTO, Cloud Services Strategy, HP
* Michael Stonebraker, PhD – CTO and Co-Founder, Vertica Systems
* Steve Herrod – CTO and Sr. VP of R&D, VMware
* Dr. Willy Chiu – Vice President, IBM Cloud Labs & HiPODS, IBM
* David Yen – EVP and GM, Data Center Business Group, Juniper Networks
* David Hitz – Founder and Executive Vice President, NetApp
* Jonathan Heiliger – VP, Technical Operations, Facebook
* Vijay Gill – VP Engineering, Google
* Yousef Khalidi – Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Corporation
* Raj Patel – VP of Global Networks, Yahoo!
* and many more!  A full list and agenda is at http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/speakers/ 

——————————————-

** SCHEDULE OF TOPICS ANNOUNCED **

We have announced our programming schedule for Structure 09. Full details available here – http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/schedule/

Some topics are:

• The Myth of the One-Size-Fits-All Cloud
• Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise Clouds As A First Step
• On The Shoulders of Giants
• Building The Perfect Host for Web Apps
• From Databases to Dataspaces
• Better Broadband: Enabling the Cloud Era

One of my favorite conferences of the year is coming up on June 23rd: the Social Gaming Summit.  I went last year, and found the talks to be clear and concise, given by top notch speakers and experienced folk in the gaming industry.  He’s following it this year with what looks to be another great event (I’ll be there!) From the site:

“The Social Gaming Summit 2009 is a one day event focused on the intersection of games and the social web. This year’s event will focus on helping social games developers build, monetize, and grow their social games. We’re bringing together the leaders in free-to-play games, social networking, and payments infrastructure for a full day of panels and talks.”

Check out the Social Gaming Summit while you await FailCon!

This is the last day to enjoy our early bird discount, good for $100 off tickets. In other words, if you haven’t purchased tickets yet, now is the time! Head here to get ‘em.

SNAP Summit^3 is looking to be our best conference yet. Pivoting off the boom in social applications, we’re expanding our focus to look at user experience and engagement, a topic relevant not only to app developers, but anyone who’s building on the social web.

If you’re coming to SNAP Summit 2.0 from out of town, and looking to save money on hotel fare, check out our page on AirBed & Breakfast. It’s a cool new site that lets you find people who are heading to the conference, and who’ve agreed to let people crash with them while the event is in town.

If you’re local, you can volunteer your space and connect with someone really cool in the process. Check it out!