Get comfortable with your big failure -- and if you're a startup or an investor, someday you may be offered the opportunity to describe your defeat to hundreds of your peers.
坦然面对自己的重大失败。如果你是一位创业家或投资者，有一天你可能会得到一个机会让你在成千上百的同道面前讲讲自己的滑铁卢。
That's what's will happen on Monday at the fifth FailCon conference in San Francisco -- and at a growing number of spinoff failure sessions from Sydney to Singapore to Spain.
这就是本周一在旧金山召开的第十五届FailCon大会，以及从悉尼到新加坡、再到西班牙越来越多的大会分会。
Failure is coming out of the closet -- and not just in Silicon Valley. "It is becoming less taboo. More people are talking" about failure, says FailCon co-founder Diane Loviglio, whose first startup failed after four years. "We're finally able to talk about this in Mexico and Europe."
失败不再不可告人，而且不只是在硅谷。“这种事不再那么讳莫如深。FailCon的共同创始人戴安`洛维格里表示，现在，越来越多的人开始聊”失败。她的第一个创业公司在成立四年后倒闭。“现在，我们终于能在墨西哥和欧洲讨论失败了。”
Loviglio and her business partner are eager to create a place where failures can be shared, learned from, and even serve as encouragement to others. "There's just a lot of energy" at the conferences, says Loviglio. "They feel inspired and empowered."
洛维格里和她的业务合伙人们希望打造一个能分享和学习失败的经验教训、甚至互相获得鼓励的场所。大会“非常活跃，”洛维格里说。“人们觉得深受启发，充满信心。”
The one-day failure conferences draw mostly entrepreneurs, along with a smattering of students, consultants, and corporate types -- some of whom are hoping to learn lessons and avoid mistakes when they launch their own startups.
这场为期一天的失败大会吸引的主要是创业家，以及少数学生、顾问和公司人士——他们中的一些人希望能学习经验教训，将来创业时少走弯路。
So far, FailCon events have been held in 10 cities, each by locals. About 15 other groups are planning FailCon meetings, says Cassandra Phillipps, FailCon co-founder and executive producer. The regional event planners operate as licensees, the same way TedX relates to the TED conference system. "The local producers can take some control of it and give it a flair of their own personality and local culture," Phillipps says.
迄今为止，FailCon大会已在10个城市举行，由各地分会举行。FailCon的共同创始人兼执行组织人卡珊德拉•菲利普斯表示，其他还有大约15个团体正在筹划FailCon会议。这些地区会议筹划者根据授权运作，就好像TedX之于TED会议体系。菲利普斯表示：“地方组织人对会议有一定的控制力，可注入一些独特的个性和地方文化。”
Next year, FailCon will land in India, and after that, it will go to Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. The conferences have landed some major sponsors, including Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon Web Services (AMZN), and Dice, the technology jobs site.
明年，FailCon将登陆印度，接着是约翰内斯堡、特拉维夫和东京。这些会议已经赢得了一些包括微软(Microsoft)、亚马逊(Amazon Web Services)和科技业招聘网站Dice等公司在内的大赞助商。
Success has encouraged some imitators too. A technology council in Baltimore produced one such imitation last year, and another called The Advantages of Failure was held in Madrid in 2011. They also must compete with an array of startup and business seminars, most of which focus on learning from successes.
会议的成功也引来了一些模仿者。巴尔的摩的一家科技理事会去年组织了一场类似的会议，2011年在马德里召开的另一场类似的会议名为“失败的优势”(The Advantages of Failure)。他们还必须与一系列创业企业和商业研讨会竞争，这些研讨会大多数专注于成功经验的学习。
FailCon claims to be the first business conference centered on failure, and it debuted in 2009, a year after Lehman Bros. collapsed and the year both Chrysler and General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It seemed a great time to talk about failure, yet Loviglio recalls, "We were a little nervous we wouldn't sell out." They did, and did again with more than 450 people a year paying around $219 apiece to share their setbacks, mistakes, and all-out disasters with others.
FailCon自称是第一个聚焦失败的商业会议。它的处女秀是在2009年，即雷曼兄弟(Lehman Bros.)倒闭一年后，同年克莱斯勒(Chrysler)和通用汽车(General Motors)也申请了Chapter 11破产。当时似乎是一个讨论失败的绝佳时机，但洛维格里回忆称，“我们当时有点担心，我们可能推销不出去。”结果他们成功了，并且一而再、再而三的举行这些会议：450多人每人每年支付约219美元，与他人分享自己的挫折、失误以及灾难。
"At other places and conferences, people only share what worked," Loviglio says. "Here they say 'We totally screwed up on hiring.' You feel good knowing that other people don't have the answers either."
“在其他地方和其他会议上，人们只分享成功，”洛维格里说。“在这里，他们会说，啊，我们在招人上搞砸了。当你知道其他人也没有答案时，你会感觉好受一些。”
FailCon responds to a global desire to learn how to best respond to business failure. "To create a truly healthy startup ecosystem, you have to first have an environment that is comfortable with its entrepreneurs taking risks and failure," says Phillipps. "Internationally, this is really lacking. A FailCon event gives innovators in these cities a safe place to talk about their failures and struggles."
全球都渴望知道如何才能更好地应对商业失败，FailCon正是瞄准了这一点。“要打造一个真正健康的创业生态环境，必须得先有一个环境，能够坦然面对创业者所承担的风险和所经历的失败，”菲利普斯表示。“放眼全球，能做到这点很少。一场FailCon会议能为这些城市的创新者们提供一个畅谈个人失败和挣扎的地方。”
Across the U.S., business failure has become more common since the recession of 2008, with the number of "business deaths" each quarter up 40% from 1994 to 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
在美国，从2008年经济衰退以来企业倒闭变得更为常见。美国劳工统计局(Bureau of Labor Statistics)的数据显示，从1994年到2009年，每个季度的“企业死亡”量增长了40%。
FailCon's cofounders work part-time along with a half dozen others who help produce the San Francisco and international conferences. Loviglio also is co-founder of a startup called Share Some Style, which offers its users online and in-person style and personal shopping advice. Phillipps works as a game designer and says that she grew interested in failure when her only startup headed south.
FailCon的共同创始人们都是兼职，他们在业余时间与其他五、六个人共同组织了旧金山会议和国际会议。洛维格里还是一家叫Share Some Style的初创企业的共同创始人。这家公司为用户提供在线和现实的风格指导，以及个人购物建议。菲利普斯现在的工作是游戏设计师。她说，几年前当她唯一的初创企业濒于倒闭时，她开始对失败感兴趣。
"I just felt so lost and confused as to what wasn't working and what I was supposed to be doing," Phillipps says. "But everywhere I went, I had to pretend to be awesome, and moving ahead, and doing great. I knew my startup was failing and just felt like I had no resources or places to go -- this was in 2008, 2009."
“我当时感觉非常失落和困惑，为什么不成，我应该怎么做，”菲利普斯说。“但不管我去哪里，那时我必须装成感觉非常好，一切顺利，好极了。我心里清楚我的创业企业行将倒闭，但就是感觉没有什么人或什么地方可以求助——那是在 2008、2009年。”
As FailCon grows, it raises the question: How different are perceptions of business failure in different countries and continents?
FailCon发展扩大也带来了一个问题：不同的国家和大陆对于商业失败的看法有怎样的不同？
One answer came from Liam Boogar at a FailCon panel in Switzerland. Boogar is originally from Silicon Valley and in 2011 co-founded Rude Baguette, a site that covers French startups. "I see no difference between a French entrepreneur and a Swedish entrepreneur and an American entrepreneur," he said on a FailCon video. "The difference is what we talk about and what we choose to project, vs. what we actually feel. You don't talk about your weaknesses, like your fear of failure."
一个答案来自瑞士FailCon委员会的连姆•布加。布加最初来自硅谷，2011年共同创立了关注法国创业企业的博客网站Rude Baguette。“我看不出一个法国创业者、一个瑞士创业者或者一个美国创业者有什么不同，”他在一段FailCon视频中说。“不同的是我们讨论的内容，我们选择突出的重点，而不是我们的感受。大家不会谈自己的弱点，比如对失败的恐惧。”
Phillipps says, "I actually think failure ... is not taboo in the Bay Area, but being in the midst of a failure still is. It's worse around the world -- many cultures see a failed idea or business as a failed human being."
菲利普斯表示，“事实上我认为失败……在现在的湾区已经不是什么讳莫如深的事情，除非还没有走出失败。全球范围内，情况要糟得多——很多文化将失败的点子或企业看成是人的失败。”
Five years of failure conferences have yielded a lot of stories, lessons, and plenty of open-ended debates. Some are documented in videos; others are firmly rooted in FailCon participants' minds. For instance, Loviglio says that there's no one answer to the debate over whether to start a business with a clear business model vs. just going out and getting customers. "You can't control everything," she says. Timing and luck are just as important as anything else.
五年的失败大会已经产生了很多的故事、经验教训以及众多的开放式讨论。有些记录在了视频中；其他则根植于FailCon参会者的心中。例如，洛维格里表示，对于创业时究竟应该具备清晰的商业模式，还是只要走出去获得客户即可，这样的讨论没有一个统一的答案。“我们不能控制一切，”她说。时机、运气和其他东西一样重要。
FailCon is ultimately about acknowledging the usefulness of failure. "People who failed at something often seem more confident about it in the future -- not immediately, but in time, once they have processed the failure," Phillipps says. "They move forward with more information and often say that, without that failure, they would not have been able to succeed."
说到底，FailCon是接纳失败，认同失败的价值。“曾经在某些事上失败的人，往往未来在这个问题上会看上去更加自信——不是立即如此，而是假以时日，等他们消化了失败后，”菲利普斯说。“他们带着更多经验继续往前走。他们常说，如果没有那次失败，不可能有后来的成功。”
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