Advice for the just-failed entrepreneur, from computer scientist Anna Patterson:
- Know when it's over.
- Acknowledge you're grieving and depleted emotionally and physically. Hire a therapist and a personal trainer.
- Reintroduce yourself to your family and your personal financial picture.
- Don’t waste time in Tahiti. Get a job right away.
Patterson is back at Google after a failed attempt to make Cuil the search engine of choice. She was the opening act yesterday for FailCon, the annual gathering in San Francisco. The conference aims to share hard-earned wisdom from business failures.
They happen all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but in most quarters, people weep silently into their pillows.
Aye Moah, Product Chief with Baydin, came from Boston. “On the East Coast, people are, like, oh, you shouldn’t mention [that she was involved with two failed start-ups] on your resume. Here, you talk about it. You discuss it. What did you learn from it?”
Vinod Khosla was perhaps the biggest name at this year’s FailCon.