"Five minutes each week that might change your life."

In 2009, 400 entrepreneurs gathered in San Francisco for a new conference built entirely around celebrating failure. Five years later, it failed.

It was called FailCon. The founder had spent years in Silicon Valley watching startups die while every conference around her was hockey-stick graphs and everybody getting rich.

So she built the opposite.

It was a hit, with spinoffs in Tokyo, Dubai, and London.

Then in 2014, FailCon… well, failed.

The official story was that they had accomplished the mission. Failure had become acceptable.

But I don't buy that, and I don't think anybody else did either.

My theory is simpler: a conference for people with recently failed startups is a conference for people who are broke, and it's hard to build a thriving conference on broke attendees.

That same year, a venture capitalist writing in the Washington Post coined the term "failure porn"—failure stories peddled by wildly successful people, about as reflective of real failure as porn is of real sex.

Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school team is the classic example.

Millions of kids got cut from their high school team. One of them became Michael Jordan.

We treat every failure as something to learn from. But turns out that’s wrong.

Some failures have almost nothing to teach you.

Others are where nearly all your real learning comes from.

See you Monday,
Mark

P.S. If every flop sends you into a spiral, you’re probably handling all your failures the same way, which is why so few of them teach you anything. My podcast co-host Drew Birnie and I spent a whole episode breaking down the three kinds of failure and what to do with each one, so the next one teaches you something.

​Listen to Failure, Solved here​