By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
Fuck Up Nights: Celebrating Business Failures
EVERYBODY screws up. This is the premise behind FuckUp Nights, a global movement celebrating professional failure and business meltdowns around the world.
It started three years ago in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where five friends spent a Friday night unwinding over booze and they realized they were tired of hearing success stories. Why not celebrate dumb decisions and learn from them? After all, everybody fails at some point in life.
FuckUp Nights is dedicated to three kinds of people: the failures, the future failures, and the liars. It aims to inspire people who fail in business to affirm to themselves that they’re not alone and it’s okay to commit mistakes. Since then, it has become well attended by, uhm, “fucked up” businessmen and enthusiasts across the globe.
And now, FuckUp Nights has reached the Philippines, which, of course, has its fair share of fucked up tales. Impact Hub Manila, which describes itself as a “for-purpose business model” that provides community platforms for entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals, decided to bring the FuckUp Nights forum to the country, which is now on its fourth session. The forum is held every last Thursday of the month and presents modern-day Thomas Edisons who understand that the secret to success also includes failure and persistence.
SUCCESS RATE
Perhaps there’s no better way to start a good FuckUp Night than to talk about the failures of Impact Hub Manila’s co-founder, Ces Rondario.
The 31-year-old social entrepreneur, who comes from a family of lawyers, was expected to pursue the same profession. But she didn’t.
She wanted to be her own boss. So she co-founded Halo Heavenly D’lites in Cubao, which serves healthy alternative dishes, and Project Catalyst, which aims to “educate, engage, and empower agents of social change.” Halo is still open for business, but Project Catalyst was a failure. It didn’t take off from its initial stage.
Merriam-Webster describes “start-up” as “a fledgling business enterprise.” Start-up businesses like Project Catalyst have a slim chance of success, as not a few leading business journals would affirm. According to the article “The Odds of Start-up Success” (Business Insider, October, 2012) -- courtesy of the start-up blog Funders and Founders -- the success rate for first-time entrepreneurs is 12%, but it rises to 20% among persistent entrepreneurs. The clear lesson is that failure is a given, but the more you try, the more you succeed.
In Ms. Rondario’s case, however, she decided to take another route and tried to find “work with a boss.” She set aside her dream to be an entrepreneur. She was almost hired, but when her interviewer learned that she was a social entrepreneur, he advised her instead, “Go change the world.” She was dumbfounded that her other dream to find “work with a boss” wasn’t going to happen. But then her first love, social entrepreneurship, was calling her back. She was destined to organize Impact Hub Manila, her dream come true.
To be sure, Impact Hub Manila, now two months into its enterprise, had the usual birth pains. Soon after its launching, Ms. Rondario and co-founders LizAn Kuster and Matt Jaeggi found themselves confronted by a tax penalty. “We were in a rush to open. We weren’t earning yet so we thought we didn’t need to file, but we failed to declare our rent and pay our deposit,” Ms. Rondario said. The neglect has caused them a huge sum of money. “It was a painful thing to learn. Fortunately, we fail fast but we learn faster. I learn from my mistakes. Failures are necessary. You can never have success if you don’t have a measure of how far you’ve gone.”
TIME MANAGEMENT
A successful start-up business needs full-time, focused entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneur Mark Agana, 27, had to learn this the hard way.
He is the brains behind the one-year-old Web site ReShop.ph, which works likeSulit.com.ph and Olx.com.ph, except that his venture goes further as an eco-opportunity platform to promote a sustainable future, foster a culture of environment-conscious people, and save the landfills. ReShop was envisioned as a free-listing Web site where anyone can give away his pre-loved items and be rewarded. But the Web site has been gathering cobwebs since its birth. It hasn’t gotten much attention, online traffic, and activity, as Mr. Agana would have anticipated, because he and his three co-founders were always busy with other things. So far, it has only 1,200 users and 200 posted items.
“It’s very slow because we are lacking in numbers and don’t have enough time. We started with four co-founders and [we] had conflict, [so] the two members left. We want to scale up and get more users, but right now the traffic is very small,” Mr. Agana said. But he is still keeping his target of 10,000 users, which is a tall order for a start-up business like his. “It’s making the community work together for bigger gain.”
Mr. Agana admits that his problem is time management. He says he has a lot on his hands and needs to set his priorities straight. Running the website also isn’t easy. But it’s difficult to discontinue this venture in recycling. “It’s very challenging. The behavior of Filipinos is very sentimental. They have many white elephants collecting dust in their closets, [and this is the case] most especially [with] small condominium owners. You are changing their behavior and lifestyle.”
According to the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), 8,700 tons of garbage are produced every day in Metro Manila alone and 40% of them are reusable. ReShop connects technology and community to encourage a revolution in recycling. Mr. Agana plans to seek partnerships with companies to complement their corporate social responsibility programs.
“I realized that you can never do it all alone,” he said, adding that his favorite mistake is “overdoing things.” Mr. Agana said he needs balance and compromise. An aggressive marketing plan would also help. The young entrepreneur should know, because, as he pointed out, too, he started doing businesses as early as childhood, when he would sell vegetables and nuts in bus terminals.
DOUBLE WHAMMY
Johan Janssen, 36, co-founded Joomla, a content management system that enables netizens to build their own website and online applications. It was ahead of its time back in 2005 and Joomla enjoyed initial success.
“When you talk about failure you need to talk about success, like somebody to look up to and learn [from], and [at] some point,…you’re gonna get fucked up. We started best and ended up worst,” said the Belgian web architect and tech entrepreneur who flew to Manila to share his fucked up tales.
Joomla started from scratch and worked its way up. “We did it with no money, no investment, no nothing,” Mr. Janssen said. Joomla basked in an all-time high during its first three years, but today, it seems to be heading toward a slow, irrevocable death. What happened?
“When you become successful there’s a point to be complacent and the risk of settling with that success,” Mr. Janssen said. “At that point, there’s [no other] way but down. Some companies manage to reinvent themselves time and again. Joomla didn’t find a way to nurture the growth. It’s going toward a slow death,” he said.
It was also a double whammy for Mr. Janssen, who was voted out of Joomla in 2008. He didn’t elaborate on the reasons, but he said he “made mistakes. There’s a lot of ego in between. They pushed it too hard, too fast.” He said this episode took him some two years to get over with. More than the depression, he felt burned out.
“You learn that there’s more to life than that. It’s a hard lesson to learn. If you’ve acted differently, things would have turned out different, but if you look back at the context, it makes sense,” he said.
Joomla was soon outpaced by a competitor like WordPress. Mr. Janssen relates the Joomla experience with Kodak. He has moved on and co-founded Nooku, which creates web applications and custom extensions, and Timble, which makes open source software that provide enterprise web solutions. Both ventures are doing well, he said.
OLD WISDOM
Why glorify our faults when we can learn from our triumphs instead?
According to scientific research, we learn best from our success than from our failures, and brain neurons connected to learning process information more efficiently from achievement.
But then again, there’s the old wisdom that we learn from our mistakes.
For John Sculley, former CEO of Pepsi and Apple and perhaps best known for ousting Steve Jobs from Apple in 1985, failures are learning opportunities. “One of the things I’ve learned is that you really only learn from your mistakes. You rarely ever learn from your successes,” he said in an interview with Entrepreneur. He qualified his past mistakes at the two companies as lack of “technical skills.”
“It’s not even a good idea to admit you have a failure because people will say, ‘Well, you failed,’ and you’re pretty much finished,” Mr. Sculley said, but “it’s how you exploit failure and make it as something to your advantage.”
Ms. Rondario agrees with this view: “It’s not that we advocate failure, but it’s opening up to your failures. When you’re able to realize what happened, that’s a success already. It’s not easy to conquer your mistakes, but it’s not impossible to learn from them.”
For Mr. Janssen, it’s a matter of defining what success and failure mean: “Failures are things you learn to become successful. Success, on the other hand, is when you like what you’re doing. It’s not about [having] a lot of money but doing things you want to do, making mistakes and learning, and not stop[ping] growing.”
FuckUp Nights is dedicated to three kinds of people: the failures, the future failures, and the liars. It aims to inspire people who fail in business to affirm to themselves that they’re not alone and it’s okay to commit mistakes. Since then, it has become well attended by, uhm, “fucked up” businessmen and enthusiasts across the globe.
And now, FuckUp Nights has reached the Philippines, which, of course, has its fair share of fucked up tales. Impact Hub Manila, which describes itself as a “for-purpose business model” that provides community platforms for entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals, decided to bring the FuckUp Nights forum to the country, which is now on its fourth session. The forum is held every last Thursday of the month and presents modern-day Thomas Edisons who understand that the secret to success also includes failure and persistence.
SUCCESS RATE
Perhaps there’s no better way to start a good FuckUp Night than to talk about the failures of Impact Hub Manila’s co-founder, Ces Rondario.
The 31-year-old social entrepreneur, who comes from a family of lawyers, was expected to pursue the same profession. But she didn’t.
She wanted to be her own boss. So she co-founded Halo Heavenly D’lites in Cubao, which serves healthy alternative dishes, and Project Catalyst, which aims to “educate, engage, and empower agents of social change.” Halo is still open for business, but Project Catalyst was a failure. It didn’t take off from its initial stage.
Merriam-Webster describes “start-up” as “a fledgling business enterprise.” Start-up businesses like Project Catalyst have a slim chance of success, as not a few leading business journals would affirm. According to the article “The Odds of Start-up Success” (Business Insider, October, 2012) -- courtesy of the start-up blog Funders and Founders -- the success rate for first-time entrepreneurs is 12%, but it rises to 20% among persistent entrepreneurs. The clear lesson is that failure is a given, but the more you try, the more you succeed.
In Ms. Rondario’s case, however, she decided to take another route and tried to find “work with a boss.” She set aside her dream to be an entrepreneur. She was almost hired, but when her interviewer learned that she was a social entrepreneur, he advised her instead, “Go change the world.” She was dumbfounded that her other dream to find “work with a boss” wasn’t going to happen. But then her first love, social entrepreneurship, was calling her back. She was destined to organize Impact Hub Manila, her dream come true.
To be sure, Impact Hub Manila, now two months into its enterprise, had the usual birth pains. Soon after its launching, Ms. Rondario and co-founders LizAn Kuster and Matt Jaeggi found themselves confronted by a tax penalty. “We were in a rush to open. We weren’t earning yet so we thought we didn’t need to file, but we failed to declare our rent and pay our deposit,” Ms. Rondario said. The neglect has caused them a huge sum of money. “It was a painful thing to learn. Fortunately, we fail fast but we learn faster. I learn from my mistakes. Failures are necessary. You can never have success if you don’t have a measure of how far you’ve gone.”
TIME MANAGEMENT
A successful start-up business needs full-time, focused entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneur Mark Agana, 27, had to learn this the hard way.
He is the brains behind the one-year-old Web site ReShop.ph, which works likeSulit.com.ph and Olx.com.ph, except that his venture goes further as an eco-opportunity platform to promote a sustainable future, foster a culture of environment-conscious people, and save the landfills. ReShop was envisioned as a free-listing Web site where anyone can give away his pre-loved items and be rewarded. But the Web site has been gathering cobwebs since its birth. It hasn’t gotten much attention, online traffic, and activity, as Mr. Agana would have anticipated, because he and his three co-founders were always busy with other things. So far, it has only 1,200 users and 200 posted items.
“It’s very slow because we are lacking in numbers and don’t have enough time. We started with four co-founders and [we] had conflict, [so] the two members left. We want to scale up and get more users, but right now the traffic is very small,” Mr. Agana said. But he is still keeping his target of 10,000 users, which is a tall order for a start-up business like his. “It’s making the community work together for bigger gain.”
Mr. Agana admits that his problem is time management. He says he has a lot on his hands and needs to set his priorities straight. Running the website also isn’t easy. But it’s difficult to discontinue this venture in recycling. “It’s very challenging. The behavior of Filipinos is very sentimental. They have many white elephants collecting dust in their closets, [and this is the case] most especially [with] small condominium owners. You are changing their behavior and lifestyle.”
According to the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), 8,700 tons of garbage are produced every day in Metro Manila alone and 40% of them are reusable. ReShop connects technology and community to encourage a revolution in recycling. Mr. Agana plans to seek partnerships with companies to complement their corporate social responsibility programs.
“I realized that you can never do it all alone,” he said, adding that his favorite mistake is “overdoing things.” Mr. Agana said he needs balance and compromise. An aggressive marketing plan would also help. The young entrepreneur should know, because, as he pointed out, too, he started doing businesses as early as childhood, when he would sell vegetables and nuts in bus terminals.
DOUBLE WHAMMY
Johan Janssen, 36, co-founded Joomla, a content management system that enables netizens to build their own website and online applications. It was ahead of its time back in 2005 and Joomla enjoyed initial success.
“When you talk about failure you need to talk about success, like somebody to look up to and learn [from], and [at] some point,…you’re gonna get fucked up. We started best and ended up worst,” said the Belgian web architect and tech entrepreneur who flew to Manila to share his fucked up tales.
Joomla started from scratch and worked its way up. “We did it with no money, no investment, no nothing,” Mr. Janssen said. Joomla basked in an all-time high during its first three years, but today, it seems to be heading toward a slow, irrevocable death. What happened?
“When you become successful there’s a point to be complacent and the risk of settling with that success,” Mr. Janssen said. “At that point, there’s [no other] way but down. Some companies manage to reinvent themselves time and again. Joomla didn’t find a way to nurture the growth. It’s going toward a slow death,” he said.
It was also a double whammy for Mr. Janssen, who was voted out of Joomla in 2008. He didn’t elaborate on the reasons, but he said he “made mistakes. There’s a lot of ego in between. They pushed it too hard, too fast.” He said this episode took him some two years to get over with. More than the depression, he felt burned out.
“You learn that there’s more to life than that. It’s a hard lesson to learn. If you’ve acted differently, things would have turned out different, but if you look back at the context, it makes sense,” he said.
Joomla was soon outpaced by a competitor like WordPress. Mr. Janssen relates the Joomla experience with Kodak. He has moved on and co-founded Nooku, which creates web applications and custom extensions, and Timble, which makes open source software that provide enterprise web solutions. Both ventures are doing well, he said.
OLD WISDOM
Why glorify our faults when we can learn from our triumphs instead?
According to scientific research, we learn best from our success than from our failures, and brain neurons connected to learning process information more efficiently from achievement.
But then again, there’s the old wisdom that we learn from our mistakes.
For John Sculley, former CEO of Pepsi and Apple and perhaps best known for ousting Steve Jobs from Apple in 1985, failures are learning opportunities. “One of the things I’ve learned is that you really only learn from your mistakes. You rarely ever learn from your successes,” he said in an interview with Entrepreneur. He qualified his past mistakes at the two companies as lack of “technical skills.”
“It’s not even a good idea to admit you have a failure because people will say, ‘Well, you failed,’ and you’re pretty much finished,” Mr. Sculley said, but “it’s how you exploit failure and make it as something to your advantage.”
Ms. Rondario agrees with this view: “It’s not that we advocate failure, but it’s opening up to your failures. When you’re able to realize what happened, that’s a success already. It’s not easy to conquer your mistakes, but it’s not impossible to learn from them.”
For Mr. Janssen, it’s a matter of defining what success and failure mean: “Failures are things you learn to become successful. Success, on the other hand, is when you like what you’re doing. It’s not about [having] a lot of money but doing things you want to do, making mistakes and learning, and not stop[ping] growing.”
