Failing with Flair at SoCap10

(Ed. Note: This is a guest post from SoCap10 by San Franista author Emily Goligoski)

There are two things to be expected from startups, if you follow IDEO’s Jocelyn Wyatt’s thinking: they’ll change their names and business models.

And, if that second or third name sticks long enough for people to know the organization, it’s likely that the founders have learned a bit about early non-success and making the wrong choices. Enter FailFaire, an open forum for attendees of this week’s Social Capital Markets conference (SOCAP) to share stories about their failed projects and social business undertakings.

Thirty entrepreneur participants were greeted to the first West Coast FailFaire with the words “it is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures” by host and humanitarian design firm Catapult Design. The format for stories about mistakes and going belly up allowed presenters ten minutes each to introduce themselves, explain what they tried to do and where it went wrong, and ponder what they’d do differently next time.

Catchafire founder Rachael Chong described her struggle to find the right developer to build Catchafire Beta. It took her almost one year, two developers and spending most of her seed funding before she found and recruited former Hulu VP of Technology to build a site that was aligned with her vision for Catchafire. Chong’s takeaways: be selective in picking technical partners (even if it means taking part in founder match events) and ensure that there’s a trial period before a new teammate can become vested.

Rules for the open-source Failfaire, which operates under a Creative Commons license, include no livestreaming. After events in New York and DC hosted by Mobile Active and the World Bank Institute, respectively, the SOCAP event was the first to feature talks that weren’t prepared in advance. Instead, a third of the participants spoke off the cuff about their experiences—and presented on their own behalves, not their organizations, per FailFaire guidelines.

Other recommendations from those who have been there? Don’t expect the first launch effort to be a commercial success. Make sure your goals are in line with your partners’. And ask yourself “is this something I’d want to work on for the next five years?” before jumping in--a good question from Skillshare that might have prevent future fails.

Photo credit: hans.gerwitz