- To start a company, you are either stupid or arrogant.
You're stupid or you're arrogant.
85% of companies fail.
85.
You've either started a company because you're not
familiar with that statistic,
(audience laughs)
you're not aware
that most companies fail, or you think you're better
than 85% of people who have started a company.
I thought we're building the thing that's going to
change the world.
So if I had a narrator for this story,
this is when he would say, "It was at this moment
"that he realized he fucked up."
(audience laughs)
- [Pepe] FuckUp Nights got started
as most good things in life.
Meaning, with friends and tequila. (laughs)
- [Narrator] This is Pepe Villatoro.
He co-founded FuckUp Nights in Mexico City, seven years ago.
- One day, four friends and I were having too many
tequilas I guess, I don't (mumbles) correctly.
And we had this conversation along the lines of,
why is everyone talking about the Bill Gateses of the world?
And we decided to change the topic.
We said, "what if we shared our most relevant failure?"
- [Narrator] With a provocative name, and a concept
that clearly struck a chord, FuckUp Nights has grown
into a global movement, with local chapters
in 338 cities.
So Freethink went to an event in Richmond, Virginia,
to see what it was all about.
(low electronic music)
- [David] People are way more comfortable saying, "fuck"
than they are talking about failure.
(laughs)
The one 'F' word is way tougher than the other,
and failure sucks.
- [Zane] We don't tell the sort of redemption story,
so our stories follow an arc that says, you know,
we hit a little bit of a challenge, and we go down
a road of despair, and we stop there.
(low electronic music)
(audience cheering)
- [Ace] I started a company called Painless 1099.
The basic premise of Painless, is we built
a smart bank account for independent contractors.
Any time you got paid by a client, your money
hit your Painless account.
And as soon as it hit, we calculate your taxes,
we'd separate your benefits, so we put all of those aside,
and then send whatever was left to your personal
checking account.
(audience murmurs)
Badass concept, right?
Like fucking awesome.
(audience applauds)
Yeah, we got hand claps.
Yeah.
We thought so too.
(quiet upbeat music)
- [David] So many people are sitting on the fence, right?
And I think they're so afraid of failure
that they don't act at all.
And having the conversation, making failure something
that's just accepted as part of the human experience,
normalizes it a little bit.
People go, "Oh, you know what?
"People are failing all the time, and it's okay,
"and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't mean I'm a failure.
"It just means the project didn't work out."
(gentle optimistic music)
- [Ace] There is one rule.
One rule.
Don't run outta cash, right?
We ran out of money.
We got to a place where we said, look,
we're out of money, we've downsized to a team of three,
we've been off the payroll for almost a year.
We can't make this work.
It was one of those moments where everything
comes to a 'T' and you realize, the thing that I've built,
the identity that I've created, the company that is
my baby and means everything to me,
may not do the thing I want it to do.
It may not be the success I wanted it to be.
- [Pepe] When we start being vulnerable, empathetic,
and authentic, people start sharing their failure
and analyzing your personal failures, it's a lot about
self-awareness that brings you to shame.
Failure is hard, it's difficult, it's shameful,
and painful.
- So, for the last year I've been shutting down
my company.
This is the first time I've talked about it in a
venue like this.
As of last week, we shut down the last two bank accounts
that we had opened, of thousands.
- [Zane] What it means to be in a moment where you're
a leader of a business, and have failed.
And you now have to personally tell all of your employees
that they no longer have a job.
That their families no longer have an income.
- [David] You're not gonna hear people giving you corporate
lines, spinning their stories.
- Fail fast, fail cheap, - Fail fast, yeah.
I mean, all that stuff is kinda good, but it's like,
it's not real and authentic, right?
Failure sucks.
And it hurts yourself, it hurts other people.
But sometimes it's unavoidable.
(audience cheering)
- [Ace] I think what's interesting is everybody
tells you how to start up a company.
Nobody tells you how the fuck to shut down a company, right?
(audience laughs)
Like nobody tells you that.
Where's the book that says, "This is how you
"wind down a thing."
And I'm here today to say, I don't know what the next
thing is, I don't know how this resolves
we all want these, I learned this thing from the story.
I've looked back and you see some of the insights,
but realistically, this is where I am today,
in this moment, figuring out what the fuck
is next, and that's tough.
(motivational music)
- [David] People in general are just so hungry
for no bullshit.
- [Zane] I think FuckUp Nights provides that venue
where all types of people can come together and be united
about a topic, and learning from failure.
Because that's really the focus.
It's to learn, it's to be more mindful.
It's not to dwell on the 'F' word, it's not to dwell
on the failures.
It's really to have those genuine, honest,
unfiltered conversations.
And we think the FuckUp Nights movement is really
tapping into that, and providing venues
for people to do that.
- Thanks for watching.
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