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San Francisco Tech Conference Teaches Innovators To Celebrate Failure

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) - More than 400 people gathered in San Francisco Monday for an all-day technology conference designed to teach the art of embracing failure.

FailCon is becoming a "must attend" event for plenty of tech innovators. One of the key tenets at FailCon: failure is not a bad word.

"It is kind of an expression of self-identity nowadays to talk about failure," one young woman suggested. "It is who people are. You're going to fail before you succeed. You should fail before you succeed."

KCBS' Chris Filippi Reports:

Another element of the conference was learning from the start-ups that never panned out.

"I have clients in other places around the world and some of them are slow to make decisions, they're more conservative even though they may be using cutting edge technology," said a man at the conference. "But what's unique about San Francisco and the Silicon Valley is that people are willing to take risks."

Monday's conference was the third annual FailCon in San Francisco. There was talk at the event about bringing it to the East Coast and Europe.

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