On October 27, 2009, the first FailCon met at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco. There, startup founders and investors talked about their failures. The conference came a year after Lehman Brothers collapsed. By 2013, local organizers ran FailCon events in ten cities.
Cassandra Phillipps, a co-founder, told Fortune that failure is not taboo in the Bay Area. Then she added that “being in the midst of a failure still is.”