E-GUIDE RECAP a Swing and a Miss
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E-GUIDE RECAP A Swing and A Miss By Jim Brown Jim Brown kicked things off at FailFest 2015 by sharing the story of Haven, which he calls “the biggest professional failure of [his] career.” After legendary successes with Slingshot SEO and Compendium, Jim and two friends raised just over $1M in Indiana in 60 days based on little more than a pitch deck. Fast forward a few months, and that money was lost forever. Jim ascribes this failure to the unexpected complexity of building his home maintenance app, to the limited work they did to test their assumptions, and to an extremely high burn rate that left little runway for the business to take off. For Jim, the prospect of undeniable failure weighed on him heavily, and fear became a big part of his life. Fear that he’d lose his investors’ money. Fear that he’d find himself financially ruined. Fear that his career as he knew it was over. But, as it turns out, a supportive community can mean the difference between ultimate failure and an ongoing journey toward success. Today, Jim has lived through failure and found that his fears were far from the reality he’d face on the other side. JIM’S TIPS FOR FAILING SUCCESSFULLY: Don’t confuse the failure of a business with your own ultimate failure. Your personal reputation absolutely can and will survive. A supportive community is an absolute must for any entrepreneur. You can’t go it alone in success or in failure, and a support network will help you make it through either scenario. Founders often go without sufficient (or sometimes any) compensation. After a failure, it’s okay to take a step back from entrepreneurship to make some money and refill your coffers. Failure brings with it fear of becoming damaged goods. One failure doesn’t mean you either have to quit trying altogether or, alternately, go bigger and bolder with your next plan to prove you’ve still got it. Failure As a Tactical Tool By Scott McCorkle Today, Scott McCorkle is the CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but his career wasn’t a direct trajectory to the top. He began his venture into the tech space on the other side of the big .com bubble, where rapid success at Software Artistry (Indiana’s first publicly traded tech company) led to an acquisition by IBM. In 1999, Scott founded his own company, Mezzia, during a time when founding a tech company may not have been such a great idea. By 2005, Scott had joined ExactTarget and begun his direct path to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but he shares that even in all the success ExactTarget has enjoyed, failure has still not been a stranger. The ultimate lesson from Scott’s journey, through both failure and what he calls “non-failure”, is that failure can come from many places, including our own mistakes, the mistakes of others, and things that just break and there’s nothing we can do about it. With Mezzia, he moved forward raising large amounts of money based not on an understanding of the market, demand for product, or even pricing, but on their own reputation; chalk that up as a Scott mistake. At ExactTarget, some of that same ignorance featured, despite a very solid understanding of the product and its market. To get answers to some questions about product development and scale, the only way to go was to push the team to its limits, fail, and learn from it. To that end, failure can be a very effective tactical tool. SCOTT’S TIPS FOR FAILING SUCCESSFULLY: The line between great success and terrible failure is very narrow. Keep in mind that it’s possible to go back and forth across that line without knowing which side you’re on. It’s critical that as an entrepreneur, you acknowledge what you’ll fail at–maybe it’s finance, or marketing, or sales–and surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. There are some things you just can’t know. If you’re not sure how to price a product, or how much capacity you have, or what your development plan should be, one way to learn is to push it until something breaks, then learn from that intentional failure. Culture is the only way to make sure a company explicitly understands how to handle mistakes and move past failures. Untitled Failure By Dante Ventresca A big part of FailFest’s purpose is to get the Indianapolis entrepreneurial scene to- gether and promote new, diverse successes out of meaningful collaboration. As the founder of the Theater of Inclusion, Dante Ventresca understands fully just how key collaborative culture is to a company’s success. The Theater of Inclusion is a small company focused on working with groups to help them flesh out what collaboration is, to demystify the creative process, and to foster a positive internal culture, Much of Dante’s presentation focused on the concept of inspiration, and how cru- cial it is for entrepreneurs to understand their own gut feelings and visceral sources of ideas, both good and bad. As he constructed a tower doomed to fail on stage in front of FailFest attendees, Dante invited entrepreneurs to think of themselves as creatives, whose ideas may not make sense at first either to themselves or to those closest to them. What’s important, though, is that creatives and entrepreneurs alike continue to build, elicit feedback, and open themselves up to failures as one idea or another just doesn’t pan out. Out of the many ideas that are wadded up and thrown out, Dante promises, something unique and powerful is sure to emerge. This is a concept Theater of Inclusion aims to reinforce with the teams they work with, using similar illustrations as Dante’s building of the tower. Using simple materials to build prototypes, a team can practice making mistakes and testing doomed ideas as a method for collaborating better and working towards bigger goals as a cohesive group. DANTE’S TIPS FOR FAILING SUCCESSFULLY: * Feedback is vital. Even if you know your collaborators or partners don’t have your entire vision front-of- mind, their feedback can help you throw away parts of your ideas that don’t work, so you can focus on the parts that do. * Always be mindful of the realities of your life that led to your ideas in the first place. Your experiences will give you a unique perspective on the problems you hope to solve, and can be a valuable asset when others fail to understand the finer details of your business plan. * We may be talking about business at FailFest, but entrepreneurship is a deeply personal phenomenon. It’s okay to own that. If your passion and your big ideas don’t translate well to a business plan at first, it’s not a failure to live with some unknowns and let your passion continue to motivate you. The key is to keep track of your failures so you can build upon them in the future. The Worst Acquisition Ever! By Jay Love Some colossal failures begin as monumental successes. Alternately, even those colossal failures can eventually lead to monumental successes, too. This is absolutely true for Jay Love, who saw a software company he worked for in 1987 be acquired to great effect by a company out of Boston named Epsilon Data Management. For ten years, the two teams collaborated beautifully, eventually leading to Jay’s promotion to CEO of the team in Indianapolis. But such success, before long, caught the eye of other companies, and eventually they were faced with another acquisition. Only this time, the buyer wasn’t interested in keeping a satellite office staffed. With the immediate layoff of the entire office in Indianapolis, Jay was left with a choice: stay on with the new company and enter corporate life, or strike out on his own in Indy and form a startup. So, in 1999, at a time when the Internet was still something of a gimmick in the public’s eye, Jay found himself with a web application for the nonprofit sector called eTapestry. This proved to be a good move for Jay, who has gone on to find much success in the nonprofit world to this day with Bloomerang and Launch Cause. JAY’S TIPS FOR FAILING SUCCESSFULLY: * Remember the “Law of Sacrifice”: to obtain something of greater value, you must always give up something of lesser value. * Surround yourself with likeminded people. When you get people together with a shared passion and shared perspective, it’s easier to create a culture that will lead to success. One Part Early Success, Two Parts Youth and Naivety, a Dash of Arrogance…Shake Well and Serve up a $1 Million Failure By Scott Wise Sometimes, the reality of failure is in the eye of the beholder. To Scott Wise, founder of Scotty’s Bre- whouse and Thr3e Wise Men Brewing Company, the word “failure” isn’t any good at all; he prefers “opportunity.” Scott’s story of entrepreneurship began all the way back when he was just 12 years old. The idea was simple: dip toothpicks in cinnamon oil to give them flavor, and sell them at school for $0.15 a pop. They sold like hotcakes until third period, when the administration shut down school due to an outbreak of rashes stemming from the cinnamon oil in the toothpicks. Failure #1 was in the books almost as quickly as the business got started. Failure #2 in Scott’s business life came, ironically, when he found too much success with his first Scot- ty’s Brewhouse location at the age of 22.