Why You Should Always Get Back Up If You Fail — Part 1
This is the first part of a story, a story of perseverance through adversity, and why you should be open to new ideas while not giving up.
In 2008 I was a system administrator at a medium-sized company. Like many of my coworkers, I’d scour the web for news. One day I stumbled upon a new site called Techcrunch, focused on startups. Back then it wasn’t just high-level news, it was all these new companies, apps and products — launching, failing and getting acquired — I was sucked in. Mind you, this was before the Crunchies, before Disrupt and way before the movie “The Social Network.” Basically, before startups were cool. Yet, what I’ll never forget is an ad on TechCrunch for a website called EDGE.IO.
Most of you probably don’t remember EDGE.IO, nor should you. What’s important though is that it was a startup from the founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington. Michael’s intention was never to make TechCrunch a leading publication for startup news because he was actually creating his own startup. TechCrunch was a side project “just to promote” Edge.
As they say, you never know where you’re going to end up or (what you’ll end up creating) until you get there. From Michael with TechCrunch to the founder of Coca-Cola to PayPal — once used to beam payments on handheld devices long before the iPhone. The idea that the destination could be so far from where one intended to go stuck with me, yet I never thought it would happen to me.
Codeanywhere and the accident of Shift
At some point in 2009 a friend of mine (now Co-founder named Vedran Jukic) came to me with the idea of an amazing in-browser code editor. Reading the then-newTechCrunch, I saw stories of multi-million dollar valuations and exits — particularly a company called Writely was acquired by Google which you may know as Google Docs now. So when I was invited to be part of this project I said, “OMG this is it, we’re going to make it big with this!”
Naturally, I assumed I was the “expert” in raising money because I read TechCrunch 😅, so we decided that investor relations, among other things, would be my job. Of course, I could raise nothing as I knew no one. Shocker. But as I found out, you can go to startup competitions –win — and get real money and meet investors. I was talking to my co-founder and said what you just read, “look, we have to go to these events, win and meet investors.” He was skeptical, and still is, but went along for the ride. To be honest it was probably because we could travel and see a new country but you take what you can get.
Thus, we applied to every event we could, and got into quite a few: from London to Beijing, Ljubljana to Belgrade and Vienna, and not once, but twice we made it to the glorious TechCrunch Disrupt stage. One thing that I remember vividly at these events was all the positive energy and hope. No one really had any money, but they were all excited, happy and planning to change the world. The optimism was addictive and I fell in love with these events and kept attending them 😓.
While we got in and pitched at these events, we never won. And while we did meet a lot of investors, none ever invested. It was quite a dichotomy, the optimism of the competitions contrasted with the stark reality of the post-2009 crash world. In Croatia, my home country, everyone was losing jobs, money or both, myself included. and yet something positive did happen during our time in Vienna; I met the founder of the conference.
While at a party, and I think we were both a bit tipsy, I told him “I love your event and am so saddened that nothing like this exists in Croatia, where I’m from.” He told me, “Why don’t you make it? I’ll help you!” Of course, me being who I am, and again, tipsy, I said, “Yeah! Let’s do it.”
The First Conference
had never organised anything more than a birthday party. I had no idea what I was doing and at the time my primary business was failing. I couldn’t even pay my bills, the electric company literally came to turn off my power and the repo man came for my car while I begged them for an extension. To make matters worse, some of the precious few people helping me organise the event left — too much work and stress. So there I was, with three days until my first ever conference, my team in shambles, only 10 tickets sold, the venue not ready, nor the programs done and I had no food for attendees. I was drinking my third whiskey with a friend, telling him how I have no idea how the hell I’m going to make this work.
If you’ve ever tried to do something for the first time, you know the only way to get it done is just to do it. So that’s what I did. In those three days I didn’t sleep at all. Until a couple of hours before the event, I was on a ladder putting up banners with the help of a teammate. At that point speakers started arriving, the printing was just finished and maybe 50 tickets sold — but still no food. Not sure if it was luck, karma or divine intervention but I get a phone call, and a stranger at the time says, “hey, you’re doing this event, do you need food? I’d like to sponsor you and send you food.” It was like OMG! “Yes, yYes of course. Thank you! Thank you!” I said in shock, but with relief. Another thing done.
Now for the people. I sat on the stairs for a second, asking myself what am I going to do? No one was coming. Little did I know that most tickets would be purchased right before the event, especially as this was a fairly small and local event at the time. Just a few hours before the event, notifications began rolling in, ping…ping…ping,…one after another, at the beginning slowly, then faster and faster, ping, ping, ping and with 5 minutes to spare we hit 250 tickets in total!
A line slowly formed in front of the venue — success! I congratulated myself, but said, “never again, you’re done!” Of course, by the end of the second day a bunch of people told me “this is great, you have to keep doing this,” and what else did I say but, “of course I will, this will be every year from now on!”
The Startup Years
“What an idiot!”, a year later and two days before the next conference, I asked myself, “why the hell would you do this again?” Like the year before, tickets were not selling, a lot was unfinished and the stress, like with any event, was immense. Certainly not as much as the year before, but I still couldn’t sleep or eat. This year we wanted to make it bigger and better, and since we live on the Mediterranean, we wanted to make part of it outside so people could enjoy the beautiful sunny weather.
“What an idiot!” I repeated to myself as I stood on my balcony at 5:00am. I couldn’t sleep as I was looking out at the pouring rain. “Rain, are you kidding me? Rain!?” Of course, there’s nothing anyone can do about the rain but keep on working and pray that it stops.
Luckily, our event was waterproof — attendees found great value in the content, and endured the weather because they wanted to learn, connect and communicate.In the end, it may have been a bit damp, but for the most part it wasn’t an issue. The event was a real success, and we had an audience of about 500 people. They loved it.
Financially it was a failure, but it felt like an achievement anyhow. I learned that while you can’t control the weather, you can control the experience within, and that’s what attendees will remember.
Much like Arrington and TechCrunch, at the time I had my online code editor Codeanywhere, which I lived from and my conference to help promote it. My idea at the time with Shift was twofold; I can help our community and peers that don’t have the resources to go aboard to meet these people and I can get investors to meet us by inviting them to our conference — the Shift Conference. As long as these things were working it was ok that we didn’t make money on the conference itself.
The next two years we kept the theme of startups and the audience continued to grow, having attendees not only from our country but from the entire CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) region. We were a success, but a failure at the same time. Not unheard of in the tech world. We lost money the first year, and what’s worse, we lost more money each passing year. Also on brand for tech. At the time I did have partners in this venture and losing money put great strain on our relationships both professionally and personally. So I did the only thing I could think of to at least salvage our personal relationships, and that was to help them exit the venture by promising to take their losses.
In other words, it left me as the sole founder of a money losing conference…
Continue reading: Why You Should Always Get Back Up If You Fail — Part 2
