FailCon: Nobody cares about your startup, and that’s a good thing, says Cheezburger’s Ben Huh

Ben Huh is responsible for much of the world’s lulz. As the founder of The Cheezburger Network, he is on a mission to make the world happy for five minutes a day. He also has a serious side: Through his new venture Circa, which just launched an app today, he wants to change the world of journalism.

But before he started a profitable business that posts cat photos online, Ben had gone through a dark phase in his life. When he failed at his first startup in 2001 and fell USD40,000 into debt, he became depressed.

“I couldn’t leave my house, I couldn’t leave my bedroom. I just couldn’t face the world,” he said at the keynote speech of the first-ever FailCon in Singapore. The burden of losing hundreds of thousands in investor’s money was too much for him to take. Read more

Folks @ FailCon Singapore: Russel Simmons – Cofounder of Yelp

Russel Simmons is in Singapore on October 15th to speak at FailCon, a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others’ failures and prepare for success. Check him out on the panels ‘How to be a kickass CTO’ and the ‘Metrics of Success’.

Russ is a card carrying member of the Pay Pal Mafia, a small group of early hires at the legendary payment platform that have gone on to build their own successful companies. In 2004 Russ and his business partner Jeremy Stopplemen set out to tackle that oh-so familiar problem of where to find the city’s best coffee / dentist / bowl of char keow teow. Their company, Yelp.com, went IPO in 2012 and launched in Singapore just last month. With all this success behind him, we wonder, what is Russ going to speak about at FailCon?

As it turns out, Russ has a lot to say.

The importance of data

Since being founded in San Francisco in 2004, Yelp has grown to become one of the most popular and influential customer review websites but it didn’t start off that way. In this early interview, co-founders Russ and Jeremy explain that the first version of the site focused on asking friends for recommendations via email. Looking at the data they found that early users didn’t email friends for recommendations, but instead found a link buried in the site that allowed them to create their own unsolicited reviews. Today yelpers have written over 30 million local reviews.

His new company isn’t so lucky

These days Russ is working on Learnirvana, a two-person startup that’s reimagining the experience of learning. As Russ explains it, “my current company is an epic business failure, since it has not yet had any real success after a year.” The core product, Lentil, helps students learn not through countless flash cards and route memorization, but by combining ideas in knowledge modeling, psychology, and interface design to create a streamlined and rewarding learning experience. As Russ says, “I am OK with having a “business failure” if I love what am working on (and can afford to fund it, hah!)”

So what is it that keeps him going, even when his company isn’t seeing the astronomical growth that this start-up celebrity is used to? His response – “I am mostly happy and relaxed about work”.

Hear more from Russ and 13 other awesome entrepreneurs at FailCon on Monday, October 15th. Bonus! Use the code SGEwin to get a 20% discount on your tickets!

FailCon comes to Asia, touches down in Singapore on Oct 15

For the first time in Asia, the US event on failure, FailCon, is coming to Singapore this October 15. First started in 2009 with more than 400 attendees, FailCon now happens across the globe. FailCon Singapore is a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others’ failures and prepare for success.

The underlying message is: If you are not making mistakes, you are not striving high enough.

FailCon’s goal is to strengthen the regional startup ecosystem and promote failure as an inevitable part of entrepreneurship. Let’s work together to de-stigmatize risk-taking and failure in the region by exploring failure in an Asian context and uncovering how companies deal with failure in the West.

Speakers

The line-up so far looks amazing, with a whole bunch of people flying in from across Asia and the US.

- Lyle Fong, Chief Strategist & Co-Founder Lithium Technologies
- Ben Huh, Founder & CEO, Cheezburger
- Ho Kwon Ping, founder and Executive Chairman, Banyan Tree Holdings Limited
- Patrick Lee, Co-founder alive not dead, previously co-founded Rotten Tomatoes
- Carl Coryell-Martin, Managing Director, Singapore office of {New Context}
- Paul Bragiel, Managing Partner, i/o Ventures
- Dr. Bernard Leong, Vistaprint and SGE (view our team page)
- Gwendolyn Regina Tan, SGE (view our team page)

More to come.

Event Details

When: Monday 15th October 2012
Where: TAB, 442 Orchard Road, #02-29, Singapore 238879
Entry: Paid event.

REGISTER HERE.

This follows two other recent events on failure in Singapore: SUTD’s Fail Week and FailStock. We’re very excited to have more talk on failure in Asia. SGE’s Gwen might also speak at the annual SXSX conference in the US in March 2013 on the culture of Asian entrepreneurs and failure. Vote here if you wanna see it happen!