Cassie Phillipps, the executive producer of FailCon
Despite the name, the first conference on “failures” (starting, raising investments, scaling, exit…) was actually… a success!
Over 400 people showed up (up from 350 attendees last year) at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco to listen luminaries such as Esther Dyson, Paul Buchheit (Gmail, Friendfeed, Facebook), Jay Adelson (Digg, Revision3) or New York Times columnist David Pogue.
For next year, FailCon founder and executive producer Cassie “Cass” Phillipps plans to take, in early Fall, the FailCon concept overseas – Beijing, Paris and Buenos Ares.
“I hoping next year, pending the budget and the assistance, to do a series of international shows making them more like workshops: half day, 100 people, bring 3 speakers from here (San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley) and 3 speakers from the hosted place,” says Phillipps.
If you’re interested to help, contact Cass directly here.
FailCon: a conference about failures and how to avoid them!
We will be attending the 2nd annual edition of FailCon today in San Francisco.
The threat of failure haunts all entrepreneurs, yet discussions about it are scarce. So Executive Producer Cass Phillipps created FailCon to provide an environment where entrepreneurs and technology companies can share their challenges and short-comings, and discuss the best way to prepare for and avoid these in the future.
“I’ve just attended too many events that regurgitate the same success stories over and over,” explains Phillipps. “I realized I can’t do what those people did right – that takes a lot of luck, too. But I definitely can avoid the things they did wrong. So why aren’t they talking more about that?”
FailCon 2010 will cover controversial topics like: “Avoiding and Recovering from Co-Founder Divorce,” “How VCs Handle Failure,” “Surviving The Exit,” “User Privacy,” “Protecting Your Brand,” “Product Disasters,” and “Failures in Digital Communication.”
Speakers include David Pogue of the New York Times, Steve Blank, Philip Kaplan of Blippy, Esther Dyson of EDventures, Cindy Cohn of the EFF, Elad Gil of Twitter, and many more. See the full agenda here.
Speaking yesterday at the Silicom Ventures Summit 2009, serial entrepreneur and “greentech” venture capitalist Vinod Khosla did his presentation on “Maintech” vs. Cleantech; about the same for the last 6 to 9 months!
For Khosla, Maintech refers to mainstream technologies like engines, lighting, appliances, cement, water, glass and buildings – which are huge markets – and can therefore impact significantly the carbon emission problem; as opposed to Cleantech which is more about huge and complex infrastructure projects like nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
I think this is more about semantic than anything else, but it does allow Khosla to rise above the rest of the “Cleantech” investors.
Don’t believe forecasts, invent your future
Khosla started his keynote by discrediting forecasters and analysts, by proving how wrong they were in several occasions; predicting oil and coal prices or the future of the mobile industry.
You just can’t predict the future with yesterday’s technologies or extrapolate the past. And the best way to predict the future is to invent it! So typical Silicon Valley.
Black Swan solutions needed, not Greenwashing
Khosla then went on at looking for some “black swan solutions” that are responsible for market shifts and ultimately energy innovation. Some of these disruptive solutions could be:
the best way to clean up the air would be to build more coal plants but using carbon sequestration (Calera)
create crude oil from wood chips/waste at refineries through a catalytic process (Kior)
A 5% difference in demand brought oil prices down from $147 to $37. So the idea is to double the efficiency of combustion engines, from 20% efficiency today to 40% and would cut oil consumption in half! “It’s not that hard.” (Transonic)
replacing incandescent bulbs with more expensive LEDs which are 10 times more efficient. The idea here is to significantly reduce the cost of LEDs
To succeed, these “black swan” solutions must return investment in 3 to 5 years, be relevant in cost, scale and not rely in any long term government subsidies and above all survive the Chindia test: it must work in countries like China and India.
Beware of charlatans
Despite being disruptive ideas, investors and the public must be wary of irrational ideas or “silly stuff,” like Sheryl Crow’s one man, one toilet paper idea! There are no “lazy” green solutions, Khosla contends.
The pragmatics survive!
Finally, for Khosla, pragmatism should prevail and that means focusing on mainstream green technologies as well as the large infrastructure projects.
And here’s a copy of an earlier version of Khosla slides:
Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, will attend the inaugural LinuxCon event in Portland, Oregon, his current hometown.
With the LinuxWorld tradeshow now gone – or should I say “expanded” to become OpenSource World – LinuxCon is now the only event exclusively focused on all things Linux.
And to make sure developers – and media! – show up for the inaugural event, despite being held in Portland, Oregon in late September, the Linux Foundation (LinuxCon’s organizer) convinced Mister Linux himself – Linus Torvalds – to show up.
It sure does help that the Linux Foundation, the latest gatekeeper for the open source operating system, is also Torvalds’ employer!
“LinuxCon will ditch the traditional tradeshow environment in lieu of a new, annual technical conference designed to provide collaboration and education on all things Linux. It will also include hands-on tutorials from the kernel community’s most respected developers,” said a Linux Foundation spokesperson.
Asked about creating yet another tradeshow in this fledging economy, the organizers responded that “tradeshows (like OSCON and the now-defunct LinuxWorld) are declining in popularity and impact, but specialized community conferences are thriving. This is an area where the Linux Foundation is uniquely positioned to offer both community and industry a valuable service.”
Ann Winblad, Partner, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
The event was moderated by Silicon Valley celebrity Tony Perkins, founder of AlwaysOn and Jason Pontin now editor in chief and publisher at the MIT Technology Review magazine. Both were at the helm of the Red Herring magazine during the go-go days!
New this year was the inclusion of 5 trends picked from “crowd sourcing”, scouring the Web and the media for the most discussed and popular trends.
Perkins and Pontin also had the opportunity to pick their favorite trend.
Here’s the list of all the trends discussed.
The Millennials Are Here. Everything is changing rapidly – Joe Schoendorf
The unstructured data deluge creates the next great information leaders – Ann Winblad
“Maintech” not “Cleantech” – Vinod Khosla
The triumph of the distributed Web – Steve Jurvetson
Consumption of digital goods on mobile devices is THE growth story of the coming decade -Ram Shriram
DC will prove to be a poor VC – Tony Perkins
The rumors of the demise of the reporter have been exaggerated – Jason Pontin
Advanced batteries will be the most popular alternative energy investment in 2009-10 – Crowd idea
Wireless broadband that will one of the only IT sectors to see increased funding this year – Crowd idea
Power and efficiency management services will see a flowering of investment and innovation – Crowd idea
Healthcare administration will see the best growth in B2B software in 2009-10 – Crowd idea
Electronic displays will prove the hottest investment in hardware this year and the next- Crowd idea
More in later posts with videos and additional commentaries. Meanwhile here’s the video excerpt introducing tonight’s event:
Google vice president of engineering, Vic Gundotra, is a fan of the micro-blogging site
The rumour du jour is of course Google in the works of buying micro-blogging site Twitter.
As expected this morning, technology visionary Tim O’Reilly asked the crucial question to Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra during their public conversation at the Web 2.0 Expo.
And the answer was less sleazy than feared.
“I’m a fan,” joked Gundotra but who refused to comment on the rumour itself.
The rumour picked some more steam yesterday when Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted that Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter for more than the $250 million the San Francisco, Calif.-startup it was valued in their recent funding.
But Twitter might never reached the $500 million bar – although part of it was overvalued stock – it was offered by Facebook a few months back!
One might think so. But that didn’t keep a handful of entrepreneurs from promoting sites they hope will prove otherwise.
Several picked unlikely niches to address. Footnote plans to use Social Security death records to create profiles of deceased people that visitors, who pay a subscription fee, can embellish.
Closet Couture wants to help women get dressed by creating virtual closets of their clothing and putting them in touch with stylists (for a fee) and merchants. Birdpost intends to appeal to bird watchers, aiding them in finding new bird species to observer.
Perhaps the most promising is Causecast, which wants to connect non-profits with people who hope to make a positive impact on the world (and donate money).
Niche social-networking sites don’t often seem to work well, said Sean Parker, co-founder of Causes on Facebook and MySpace. Yet companies such as Causecast are addressing a “really important space,” with billions of dollars of transactions moving online in the next several years.
Making money from and sense of new media on the Web – video, photos and social interactions – may be the job of the next generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Up to now, few startups have figured out how to turn the public’s spiraling interest online social connections, video clips and sharing information into successful business models.
Don’t expect any quick change to this imbalance of audience and money. Still, several young companies took their cut at this intractable problem Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.
If one thing is clear at this year’s TechCrunch50 it is that Web 2.0 is permeating the business world.
Entrepreneurs, having watched the rapid adoption of consumer Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, are hatching companies to take and adapt these technologies for the corporation.
“I think there is a big movement toward the enterprise,” notes Keith McCarty, marketing manager for Yammer.
Is the long-hoped-for merger of Hollywood sparkle and Internet ubiquity finally taking place?
Don’t count on it. Yet, several companies took significant steps toward bringing studio-quality productions to this Web this week at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.
For years, entrepreneurs have seen bringing 3D environments and more polished video to the grainy, jerky Net as a holy grail of sorts.
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 4 months ago
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