David Hornik and Zynga founder Marc Pincus talked about the projects that didn’t work — the ones few people remember, including the first four companies that failed for Levchin before PayPal sold to Ebay for $1.5 billion.

This year’s line up includes New York Times writer David Pogue, former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, former Flickr community manager Heather Champ, angel investor and Gmail creator Paul Bucheit with an opening keynote from start-up guru Steve Blank, who dedicates himself to keeping startups from failing.

Failcon, the brainchild of event producer Cass Phillipps, isn’t about celebrating failure, but about talking about why ventures failed, how failure can be acceptable, and even how to fail gracefully e.g. how do you lay off employees, shut down a company and explain to investors that their money was for naught.

“Failure is interesting,” Phillipps said. “My goal with FailCon isn’t to make money, it’s to not lose money and change people’s opinions about failure.”

The one-day conference is being held on October 25 in San Francisco, targeting start-ups. Tickets are $280 in advance, though there are plenty of discounts to be found with a simple search. Founders can also get much steeper discounts by pleading leanness, according to Phillipps.

FailCon originated, appropriately enough, from unhappiness of her earlier conference called SNAP Summit, which was devoted to social networking applications and after a few years felt stale.

“Essentially the idea for Failcon came from sitting in my own show and thinking ‘I’ve heard these ideas a lot — These are the same speakers telling the same stories,’” Phillipps said. “And as a joke, I started telling attendees, ‘I wish they would tell us more about failure and what went wrong with Facebook, with your app, with scaling — I don’t know if I can be the next Zynga, but I can at least not do that.’”

The conference’s début earned Phillipps a fair share of negative attention.

“I got dozens from complete strangers saying ‘Why are you encouraging failure?’ ‘Why are you talking about this? It’s so discouraging to the industry.’,” Phillipps said.

But oddly, she says it’s surprisingly easy to get high profile people to speak, in part, she thinks because people find talking about what they went through cathartic.

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Authors: Ryan Singel

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