Archive for the ‘business’ Category

FailCon 2011

FailCon 2011 went down with so much failing, it began to feel good. Below you will find some memorable moments from some of the speakers at this year’s event:

Ethan Bloch of recently acquired, Flowtown, on business models

Joe Gebbia of Airbnb discusses the trough of sorrows and funding Airbnb while selling 20k of Obama Os cereal

Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures talks about how he doesn’t mind failing

Thanks Cass Phillipps and Diane Loviglio for putting on a great conference!

Foto del Dia 10.19.11

"One of the things we’ve come up with in the negotiations is what we call a ‘stretch’ provision. And a stretch would allow a team to now stretch the money, the payment, over a long period of time. So if they decide to cut a guy, they can pay him over 10 or 12 years as opposed to paying him all in one lump sum." - Billy Hunter (center above) from the NBAPA

Will we ever see basketball again? Read about the gap between them, also the source of the image.

Learning from Others

An entrepreneur’s tale of a restaurant startup. Click here to read on.

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Self Employment Policy

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Dreamliner Ships

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No Layoffs and Feeding Your Employees…

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A Balance Sheet Recession

Learning from Japan, "This is not a common cold, this is pneumonia." :

At a cost of $235,263 per job, paying people high wages to help the domestic economy mend artificially created scarcities is not a cure for global economic stagnation. Is it possible to optimize rationality? We need to hope so.

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Slate offers eight drastic policy measures necessary to prevent global economic collapse…is it really getting to this?

On a side note, who doesn’t like chocolate….if utilized by Africa it could have a major impact on the standard of living…

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Bitcoin Pulls a Flemming

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FailCon 2011 Warm Up

If you wondered how people win, they failed to get there. FailCon is bringing together 20 speakers and a series of workshops to study the failure process. Happening October 24th, 9:00a - 6:00p at Hotel Kabuki, SF, it is bringing to light the often tabooed use of the term failure.

As an entrepreneur, you will inevitably encounter failure; it is overcoming it that is the biggest challenge. At FailCon, we help you do just that. Join founders and partners from MySpace, Uber, Cuil, Airbnb, Khosla Ventures, MindJolt, KISSmetrics, PBworks, Second Life, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and more as share advice on how to reach success.

Past ninja speaker from 2010 and teacher legend, Steve Blank, offers some insight about start-up customer development and the role of the pivot (from 30 years of experience mind you):

So why attend a conference about failing as opposed to winning? Because it is refreshing to see the leaders of the tech world to talk about their bumpy path as opposed to a course that just happened exactly as it was supposed to (does that happen at all?).

MNP will definitely be checking out The Failure of Business Models and Negotiation - How To Not Fail At Getting Your Way. As you may or may not know, we embrace failure- if the resident ninja is seen with a broken computer in tote, you will know that they are failing to success and say what’s up! We hope to be able to learn from FailCon about………monetization- I know, outlandish right? Something that has eluded the ninjas in this part of the blogosphere…

Ed. note: Over the past five years, the look and feel of myninjaplease.com has been updated numerous times and for those that have stuck with us through our early days of coming off like a science project (no, really) and to where were at today, know that we have a long way to go! What better way then to continue on then to learn from the pitfalls en route to building something better the next time.

And when you’re ready to buy tickets to FailCon 2011, use the code, "my ninja" and receive 15% off!