Founders Café: Lessons of Failure
Join us on July 31st for a special Founders Café! You’ll hear from local entrepreneurs as they share their stories, confess some of their mistakes and talk about failing – both big and small. Then chat with them and other entrepreneurs and founders in the room!
Vanessa Paesani
Active real estate investor with a healthy obsession for sales and business development, Vanessa has helped create a number of initiatives including RIDDL and Amplify: East. But her story really starts back in 2010 when she joined as the first employee after the founder of an energy and environmental education startup. She showed up on that hot day in August to a warehouse - yeah, a warehouse - and her addiction to business and entrepreneurship was officially sealed.
Fred Laforge
Starting as a freelance designer after being fired from his job, Fred quickly grew his business to a very successful UX/UI design shop called Smithy Creative Group. He then dabbled in various ventures like a province wide delivery service, a group purchasing app for small businesses and an equipment rental app. After trying out two business models for the Farmers' Truck, he's now designing and building mobile market trucks for food banks to serve food deserts. From failure, to pivots, to success, Fred can tell you all about it.
Roger Attlee
Roger trained under one of India's leading advertising and fashion photographers, before moving to Mid-day, India's leading tabloid, where he excelled at information design. He has spent 20 years in Dubai, honing his skill at DDB, a leading international ad agency, and come 2006, he founded his own brand and design agency, Punch Branding. What sets him apart is his creative versatility, his design mastery, and indeed his knack for solving problems, but sometimes that creative genius has, in fact, led him to ruffle a few feathers in the board room.