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 founder and CEO of kiip (pronounced “keep”), a mobile rewards network, backed by True Ventures. Kiip has raised over $4.4 million in funding to date and is redefining the advertising industry through a “moments”-based value model, versus the traditional attention based screen estate model. Very recently, Kiip was listed by Forbes as one of the “4 Hot Online Ad Companies to Put on Your Watch List”. Brian was also recently listed to AdAge’s Creativity Top...
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 switched sides and 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...
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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