A sold-out crowd gathered in Halifax last night to learn from, reflect on, even laugh at other people’s failures, and in doing so join a movement that has spread to more than 300 cities in 90 countries.
The Halifax chapter of Fuckup Nights held its first meeting on Thursday to hear three local heroes discuss the times they screwed up in business or their lives and how they learned from it. Fuckup Nights is an international organization that believes the best education comes from, well, fuck-ups. It holds get-togethers in which people openly discuss their mistakes and what they learned.
“Fucking up is a privilege,” said Lindsay MacPhee, the founder of the Floatation Centre Halifax and one of the presenters. “It means we’re alive. It means we’re going to grow. And it also means we keep on pushing forward and we come out the other side.”
The story of Fuckup Nights dates back to 2012 when five friends got together in a bar in Mexico City and began swapping war stories about their greatest failures. As the evening wore on, they realized they were learning from each other’s tales of the banana skins they had trodden on in their lives. They got so much out of it that soon they opened it up to the public, and the Fuckup Nights movement was born.
A while back, the Ottawa chapter of Fuckup Nights held its quarterly meeting in conjunction with its SaaS North conference. The attendees that night included Haligonians Mary Jane Leslie and Melissa Cooper, who decided Halifax needed a chapter of its own. So Leslie and Cooper – who work together at the Software-as-a-Service security company Liferaft – worked with the international Fuckup Nights organization to open in Halifax.
Well before the Raptors game started on Thursday, a crowd gathered at the Good Robot Pub on Robie Street, enjoying beer subsidized by Stewart McKelvey, to witness the trio of confessions. As well as MacPhee, the fuckers-up on stage were serial entrepreneur Shawn Wilkie and screenwriter Michael Amo, whose credits include TV series Pure.
All the speakers were funny, willing to laugh at the mistakes they’d made. They spoke of their own business mistakes, and the failures that the universe thrust upon them. Some revealed personal tragedy. They all spoke of the ups and downs involved in being entrepreneurs or creative people.
Wilkie, for example, joked about barely breaking even in college when he and a friend invested $10,000 on a scheme to sell office chairs to college kids. That was nothing compared to the $750,000 he lost in buying three video retail franchises early in the century. On a more positive note, he still owns half of Robotnik, a thriving business that sells computers to students, and has launched the Halifax startup Talkatoo.
The talks were instructive for entrepreneurs. MacPhee spoke of her over-arching goal to be kind and having to learn that as an employer she has to sometimes make unpopular decisions.
Overall, the upshot of the evening was that it is sure to be repeated.
“We sold this out in less than two days and that shows that there is a need for something like this,” Leslie told the crowd. “We hope to make it a quarterly thing.”