By Ebony Romero / New Mexico News Port
Dozens of entrepreneurs gathered at Tractor Brewing Company Wells Park for Fail Night April 7 to share stories of their entrepreneurial failures and the lessons they learned following their defeated pursuits.
Rather than focusing on successes, the entrepreneurial happy hour hosted the second official “Fail Night,” with three guest speakers who spoke about their biggest failures in hopes of providing valuable insights to others.
Photo by Ebony Romero/New Mexico News Port
“The idea that you can’t hide your failures as entrepreneur is a great message,” said Eric Renz-Whitmore, co-organizer of Fail Night and founder of Emergent Wave Consulting.
“I think the reason why we’re trying to tell these stories is so you can recognize that everyone has failures and we can move past them as individuals and as a community.”
Renz-Whitmore added that the message of Fail Night goes beyond just teaching entrepreneurs to learn from their failures, but other individuals with goals as well.
“Everyone should feel a little more comfortable sharing that things didn’t go well and they can move past it. It’s so special to everyone that wants to achieve anything… it could be a project at work. Just dig in, do more”
Photo by Ebony Romero/ New Mexico News Port.
Paul Singh, successful startup adviser and investor was able to speak at the Fail Night event while visiting Albuquerque for his entrepreneurial tour, Results Junkie Tech Tour.
Singh spoke on some of his personal experiences in his career and stressed the importance of not being shy about not succeeding.
“Don’t hide from your failures. I made a point to write about every single one of those things whether it worked or not, I wrote about them and I ended up meeting some really cool people,” Singh said.
“For our parents’ generation, success was about grey hairs. For our generation, it’s about how many things you’ve tried,” Singh quipped.
“One of the most important things that any of us can do is to learn how to communicate and inspire people.”
Asselin shared his own experience and called it “life changing”
“My ten years that cost me everything and put me on a very, very tight schedule ultimately led me to understand some things that have completely changed everything that I do,” Asselin said. “The way you way set the table and your expectations define what your failure is.”
Devore said she learned a lot and ultimately “turned something that was really bad into something really good.”
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