FailCon

Who Are The Producers?

Cass Phillipps – Executive Producer

Cassandra has been a startup event producer for over three years, producing and managing numerous conferences, including FailCon, SF MusicTech Summit, Inside Social Apps, Unleashed Conference, Startup Seminars, and many more. She works with clients to insure each has a high-quality and profitable event, connecting them with the best partners, sponsors, and speakers for their topics. Before moving to the start-up industry, she served as a stage manager at various theaters around the country, including the American Conservatory Theater, Chicago Court, Marin Theater Company, and Aurora. Cassandra has a B.A in Human Development from the University of Chicago.

Diane Loviglio – Associate Producer

Diane is a User Experience Researcher, currently working at Mozilla, but she used to freelance for consumer, technology, healthcare and environmental startups in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to that she co-founded a startup, Wattbot, that isn't around anymore, so she's familiar with failure.

It's time to stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it.

FailCon is a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others' failures and prepare for success.

We all have founded, worked for or invested in startups that have failed. We're smart, we keep up with the latest in technology trends, but sometimes just don't go as planned. How can you predict what will work and what won't? Well, you can't.

But that doesn't mean you should stop trying. It just means you should start exchanging stories of what didn't work and how you pivoted, why you couldn't raise money, what the wrong hires were like, and when you decided it was time to let go. Entrepreneurs need to hear that from each other: that it's okay to fail, it doesn't mean you're worthless. You're just like the rest of us, learning from our making mistakes and building something bigger next time.

Our Story

FailCon was started in 2009 by Cass Phillipps, an event planner for startup events and Diane Loviglio, a founder of a cleantech startup.

We'd both produced or attended numerous events for the technology industry, but had begun to realize things were starting to get repetitive. Events put successful entrepreneurs on stage to talk about how they made their company great, something that's near-impossible to replicate, and never about what they learned from mistakes along the way. In talking to other attendees, we saw this was a pretty universal opinion; and so we decided to work with the community and, together, make something stronger. Our first event launched with over 400 attendees, and we've continued to grow since then. We hope you'll join us and add your unique story and experience to our own.