How to leverage failure in order to succeed

Michael Wolfe was the first speaker at the conference. He is a serial entrepreneur from the Silicon Valley who has been a founder, founding employee, or executive at four start-ups. He sold two of them and floated a third at the stock exchange. But he also knows what failure means. Wolfe had to close down one company and spoke about several near death experiences regarding the other start-ups.

Wolfe cleared up with the prejudice that Silicon Valley is a paradise for failures. “Failures are tolerated but not celebrated”, he said. In addition he gave reasons why tech entrepreneurs fear to fail. Usually entrepreneurs are high achievers: they were good at school, good students etc. Therefore they never learned to fail. So it might be a good advice for founders to have at least one person in the team who learned from his mistakes in the past.

During the day a lot of other important and sometimes surprising tips for start-up founders could be heard.

A panel discussed the reactions of investors to failure and the advice of the entrepreneurs and of the investors was to communicate transparently all the time. Dorian Selz, founder of Memonic and Squirro, said: “I had support from my investors in tough times due to my transparent communication.”

The advice Dania Gerhardt from Amazeelabs gave contradicted the often heard belief that is better for start-ups to fail fast. Gerhardt said that it takes time to learn from mistakes and to adjust a business model. In her eyes it is much better to fail slowly.

Another interesting advice was given by Sandrine Szabo, founder of netinfluence. The said that every entrepreneur should have someone with whom he or she can talk about failure. And she also pointed out that it’s not too easy to find such a person. The person should not be working in the company and friends and family often do not understand the thoughts, fears and actions of an entrepreneur. So it is a good idea for founders to look for a mentor who understands the perspective of the entrepreneur but isn’t involved too closely in the company.

The last advice I want to mention is from Michael Wolfe again. He explained that innovation needs failure but that our culture isn’t failure friendly. In this regard his advice to the start-up founders in the audience was: “Change yourself to change the culture.”

The event which was supported by CTI Invest and the Canton of Zurich was very well received. So it is likely that the first Swiss Failcon wasn’t the last.