In Silicon Valley, failure has been democratized. You don’t need a lot of money to fail. Nor do you need any previous experience. Take, for example, Brian Wong and Roger Dickey – two young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who, in spite of their youth, are already steeped in failure. Wong, who was the youngest person ever to receive venture capital funding and is now the CEO of the mobile rewards network Kiip, once worked at Digg – the paragon of a failed Silicon Valley technology start-up. While Dickey managed to build 16 sixteen (yes, that’s SIXTEEN) failed Facebook apps before getting lucky with Mafia Wars.
When I spoke to Wong and Dickey earlier this week at FailCon, they both embraced the idea of failure. It’s all about “mental resilience”, they told me. Every setback is a “learning opportunity”, they said, and they described failure as “the ultimate rebirth”. Great failures of the past include Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers, they explained, while Groupon’s Andrew Mason and Zynga’s Mark Pincus are today’s heroic failures, guys who failed so fast and frequently that in the end that had to get something right.
This is the fourth and final interview from the excellent FailCon event (many thanks to the BAMM.TV crew for filming the interviews). Check out my previous conversations about failure with Vinod Khosla, MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe and Wavepoint Ventures GM Peter Gardner.
Kiip is a rewards network, founded by Brian Wong, Courtney Guertin, and Amadeus Demarzi.
Brian Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Kiip (pronounced “keep”), a category-creating mobile rewards network that is redefining mobile advertising through an innovative platform that leverages “moments of achievement” in games and apps to simultaneously benefit users, developers and advertisers. Backed by Relay Ventures, Interpublic Group, Hummer Winblad, True Ventures, Digital Garage and others, the company has raised $15.4 million in funding to date. Kiip has been named one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company,...
Vinod Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems, where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Sun was funded by longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 1986 Vinod joined Kleiner Perkins, where he was and continues to be a general partner of KPCB funds through KP X. Through the years there, with other partners, he took on Intel’s monopoly with Nexgen/AMD (the only...
Chris DeWolfe is the co-founder and former chief executive officer of MySpace.com, the leading online lifestyle portal. He currently serves as the CEO of SGN, a social gaming platform, which he joined in March 2010. DeWolfe continues his entrepreneurial mission at SGN. As CEO, DeWolfe led the acquisitions and rollup of MindJolt, SGN and HallPass Media, creating a leading independent multiplatform game developer and publisher. He stepped down as CEO in April 2009. DeWolfe, alongside co-founder and president,...
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