Stopped me in my tracks a bit because one of WIT’s mission is to promote entrepreneurship and innovation and I guess I didn’t see it from that side of the prism.

The CEO of Everbread, who spoke at WIT Conference last year, said seven in 10 startups fail so perhaps, he suggested, some government grants should cover counseling or post-failure phases instead of just covering the launch stage.

I reckon that’s a good idea. It reminds me of a story I heard that there’s this big gaming tycoon who makes money from casinos and then his wife has a counseling practice to heal the losers.

Anyway, yesterday, I was at Echelon 2011 – and will be again this afternoon moderating a session on travel investments – and I’ve never smelt so much entrepreneurship sweat in one room. (There were more men than women, so I use the word ‘sweat’ deliberately.)

Yes, the big brands were there – Nokia, Microsoft, Yahoo – but almost everyone I met was working on a startup and were all fired up on their idea.

You know, that initial fever when your idea’s so great it’s going to change the world and how could anyone not see it?

I know. Been there. Am there. Perhaps always will be there. It’s addictive, and it’s infectious.

I met someone I knew – seen him many times before but I’ve never seen him with such fire in his eyes. He’s working on a travel idea and he is sinking everything into it, “every dollar I have”. He’s spent his whole career rehearsing for this big debut. I wish him luck.

It takes a certain sort to be an entrepreneur. Listening to the speakers on stage, it was easy to pick out the warriors from the thinkers.

Warriors like Lim Der Shing who started Jobs Central and whose competitive spirit you can smell a mile off.

Or KF Lai of Buzzcity, a mobile Internet advertising agency, who in a session on “Mobile telcos: Asia’s gatekeepers”, was obviously getting impatient with the discussion on how telcos were holding back the industry and his point was, why worry about that, things are changing, our goal is to be different, to be rebels …

Lund himself is a rebel, and he himself has failed – he went down in a sea of debt in his 20s when he became obsessed with a media company and sank everything he had into it.

But he’s since bounced back and the big shift within him is a new focus – he says he only focuses on two businesses now, Everbread and Tradeshift.

At the keynote session, Derek Sivers of CD Baby, speaking about “Uncommon Sense”, also said it was okay to go against conventional thinking that you must not give up on your idea. Sometimes, you have to know when to give up.

And that, to me, is not failure, that’s wisdom.

So to all you entrepreneurs out there, be prepared to fail. That in itself is motivation not to.