Last night’s Flounders event at the ever-awesome science gallery was straight up one of the best tech events I have ever been to, and certainly the most fun!
The event was a celebration of failure and the interesting (and hilarious) things we can learn from it.
Below are 5 of the awesome lessons learned from the night: (Speakers twitter accounts are hyperlinked should you want to say hello to them)
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Noel Toolan
In his previous life working for a major drinks company Noel was involved in the attempted global launch of a drink that judge, and man-in-the-know, Constantine Gurdiev referred to as “sugar mixed with rocket fuel.”
He recounted the Outrageous levels of analysis paralysis that went on and ultimately led to huge swathes of wasted time and money flushed down the toilet. His lesson on this was that launch should happen as soon as possible so you can see what the customer really thinks. Endless reports will get you nowhere.
The second nugget of wisdom was that it is results, not effort, that should be celebrated.
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Ian Lucey
Ian regaled the audience and judges with the story of how choosing the wrong client to work with can really come back to bite you in the ass in both the short and the long term. “We knew things were not looking good when the guy stumbled into a meeting with us drunk”
If he ever decides to give up in the biz world Ian would make an awesome stand up comic.
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Russell Banks
Russell recounted the story of how his startup Conker started to fall apart right in the days preceding his wedding. Soon after the wedding he decided that conker needed to go to a better place (startup heaven).
However out the ashes of conker rose his new venture Pirate Dashboard.
His main lesson from the failure of Conker? Not meeting enough customers. According to banks he is out there talking to prospective customers 20 or so times a week now!
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Cilian Fennell
Cilian worked as a producer on the Late Late show with Gay Byrne and was primarily responsible for finding talent for the comedy part of the show.
In an attempt to modernise the show a bit Cilian booked controversial, often foul-mouthed, US comedian Denis Leary in for an interview with host Gay Byrne, assuring the more conservative host that it would be well worth it.
The result was car crash TV, and his lessons from this were a) don’t assume you are always correct b) sometimes the old guy in the room might be right and c) don’t go for a niche when you are trying to serve a mass market.
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Mark Little
Mark, whose startup Storyful was recently acquired by News Corp dropped into tell us all about the trials and tribulations in the lead up to the acquisition.
One of the greatest fears for Mark was “The fear of failing the people who have bought into your dream”
According to Little, the best way to deal with the fear of failure is to confront it head on “Inability to confront the failure is the main problem”, and when you really think about it, what’s the worst that can really happen?
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All in all it was a fantastic event, with amazing speakers, brilliant judges and expert MCing by Paul Hayes. The above post doesn’t really do it any justice but hopefully gives you a taste for what went on. Oh and if my memory has resulted in slight butchery/misrepresentation of the stories above… apologies 🙂