Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it.

FailCon is a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers, and designers to study their own and others' failures and prepare for success.

We all have founded, worked for or invested in startups that have failed. We're smart, we keep up with the latest in technology trends, but sometimes things just don't go as planned. How can you predict what will work and what won't? Well, you can't.

But that doesn't mean you should stop trying. It just means you should start exchanging stories of what didn't work and how you pivoted, why you couldn't raise money, what the wrong hires were like, and when you decided it was time to let go. Entrepreneurs need to hear that from each other: it's okay to fail; it doesn't mean you're worthless. You're just like the rest of us, learning from making mistakes and building something bigger next time.

Our Story

FailCon SF, our flagship event, was started in 2009 by Cass Phillipps, an event planner for startup conferences, and Diane Loviglio, founder of Share Some Style.

We had begun to realize things were starting to get repetitive in the startup event industry. Events put successful entrepreneurs on stage to talk about how they made their company great, something that's near-impossible to replicate and never about what they learned from mistakes along the way. In talking to other attendees, we saw this was a pretty universal opinion; so we decided to work with the community and, together, make something stronger. Our first event launched with over 400 attendees, and we've continued to grow since then. We hope you'll join us and add your unique story and experience to our own.

Our Team

Cass Phillipps, Executive Producer

Cassandra has been a startup event producer for over five years, producing and managing conferences like FailCon, SF MusicTech Summit, Inside Social Apps, Unleashed Conference, and many more. She works with clients to ensure each has a high-quality and profitable event, connecting them with the best partners, sponsors, and speakers for their topics. Recently, she's escaped to the land of game design, determined to find what makes people have fun! You can follow her adventures on twitter @webwallflower

Diane Loviglio, Producer

Diane is the CEO of Share Some Style. Prior to Share Some Style, she was Mozilla's first qualitative User Experience Researcher. She freelanced for over a dozen of startups in New York and San Francisco. And her first startup, Wattbot, isn't around anymore, so she's familiar with failure. You can follow her on twitter @dianeloviglio

Heather McGough, Associate Producer

Heather McGough is the founder of Urbanity Events. Urbanity specializes in producing tech and startup conferences, speaker series' and launch parties in the Bay Area and beyond. Her portfolio includes such conferences as FailCon, The Lean Startup Conference, the Future Energy pitch series out of NYC and many more. Heather enjoys meeting new people from all walks of life and is passionate about helping entrepreneurs from around the world connect and solve problems. She is naturally curious and if approached will ask you 5 million questions about where you're from, what you do, how you do it, and why. Consider yourself warned.