Getting to the point of telling, in front of an auditorium full of people, the details of a venture that did not work, is not easy and comes after living an intense personal process. That is exactly what happens in each edition of Fuck Up Night (FUN), where in eight minutes, five entrepreneurs share experiences that failed, but that left them with a valuable learning experience when facing new work challenges.
For FUN organiser Ignacio Roche, the presentation of these failed experiences "is healing". And even, in some cases, talking about it in front of many people helps to be able to "leave it behind".
Pablo Gagliardi will be one of the speakers at the next FUN Montevideo, to be held on Thursday 30 November at 19.00 in the LATU Auditorium. Gagliardi will make reference to "several failures" at work and considered that sharing this kind of stories "is totally therapeutic". But before being able to do so, he had to accept his mistakes and stop "blaming the world".
In an interview with Café y Negocios, he included in his list of "mistakes" personal defects such as "arrogance, ego and individualism". And he admitted to having realised that "the group is key".
He is currently focused on Prezzta, a fintech company that was selected by Google Latin America to participate in a programme to drive expansion.
Failing and forgiving
FUN was born five years ago and spread to different cities around the world. Until that time, there were plenty of talks by successful entrepreneurs who talked about the positive aspects of their business, and where there was little room for error.
Unlike elsewhere, where exhibitions are held once a month, the Montevideo meeting takes place once a year. The project was adapted to the local reality, "a culture quite averse to failure".
For one of the organisers, Gastón Menéndez, a systems engineer with a master's degree in management of technology companies, the fact that society is particularly resistant to failure makes it difficult for Uruguayans to take risks and take a chance on what they "really want".
"Although the entrepreneurial culture in Uruguay has grown a lot and there have been a lot of initiatives, events and organisations that support it, we still lack the ability to say 'I'm going to take the risk', 'I'm going to try'," he said. Given this reality, having a space where you can listen to the story of a person who did badly, but who "is there; he is moving forward; he has other opportunities and is doing things", encourages people to think that "there is nothing wrong with failing" and that "you have to go on".
Demystifying failure was also addressed by one of the FUN speakers, Justin Graside, organiser of TEDx Durazno. "Failure is part of the rules of the game. In general, only 10% of startups that start up survive after two years and I would dare to say that, in Uruguay, the percentage is lower, unfortunately", he reflected. But for there to be an increase in the number of successful companies, which leads to "more businesses and local jobs", it is necessary to "increase the number of entrepreneurial attempts". Graside will refer in his presentation to his personal venture of a web application that automatically generated online marketing strategies for small and medium-sized businesses, which did not succeed.
For another speaker, Fernanda Ariceta of the advertising agency Alva Creative House, sharing these kinds of experiences helps others to "take courage to fail and forgive them". She said that "fear" is "the main element that makes us fail", but it can be an "alarm that one is about to get into trouble or to do something really significant".
Clear ideas
In the various presentations of the speakers, there is often a common theme that leads to the failure of a venture. Common are failures in team building and choice of partners. There are also issues of "organisational structure", and there is always the question of whether to expand or to stay with a reduced organisation.
"Failure is a sign that it was tried. Justin Graside, TedX Peach organiser
Time-related problems are present; for example, not going to market at the right time but before the conditions were in place for the venture to prosper. Other issues such as lack of investment and financing are also present. And even more personal aspects, because one can realise while being independent that one prefers to remain dependent because "one was not born to be an entrepreneur", explained Rodrigo Sánchez, who is also part of the FUN organisation.
Not losing focus is one of the points when talking about failure. Pablo Balseiro, head of BM Business Partners, a company dedicated to providing professional services in business development, is another of the speakers scheduled for the FUN.
He will talk about the origins of his consultancy (Balseiro Marketing) where he started advising small and medium-sized companies in the area of marketing and sales. But fixed costs meant that he did not reach the "break-even point" so he decided to "incorporate more services" into the business.
"The outlook was not better, although we still thought that by increasing the number of options, turnover and profitability would improve," he recalled. One of the main lessons learned was that one should not lose focus of one's objectives and that having more options "often leads to a loss of quality, constancy and effort". He emphasised that "people prefer a specialist and not a generalist".
Another speaker at the fourth edition of FUN will be Pablo Arriola of Oz Media, who will talk about "the losses" over 15 years of working at the helm of the same venture, and how the failures helped to solidify the media project.
Source: The Observer
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