FUCKUP Nights is a business success founded on failure.
While a lot of business talk focuses on achievements, accomplishments and strategic self-promotion, FuckUp Nights are networking events that encourage “vulnerable storytelling” about mistakes, mishaps and setbacks.
This taboo-busting take on failure started in Mexico City in 2012 and has since grown into a global community, with FuckUp Nights reaching more than 300 cities in more than 90 countries. Participants describe their experiences as “disruptive,” “cathartic” and “liberating.”
Local entrepreneurs Andres Bazin and Jasmine Bhullar are the license-holders for FuckUp Nights Winnipeg, which kicked off earlier this year with a sold-out April event and has a third get-together scheduled for October. Featured speakers — or, as the FuckUp organization affectionately calls them, “Fuckuppers”— have included Teri-Lynn Friesen, co-founder of Fête Ice Cream & Coffee, Amanda Buhse, CEO and chief creative officer of the Coal and Canary candle company, and Shawn Black, the man behind the “death before decaf” nitro cold brew coffee outfit Sheepdog Brew Co.
Bazin’s interest in FuckUp Nights started in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. In-person business meetups were on the decline, while reliance on social media — where people can present polished, perfect versions of themselves and their companies — was increasing.
“I was craving new experiences, honest experiences,”
Bazin relates. Social media, he suggests, can be “so fake, so bullshitty, so inauthentic,” and it felt completely different from the conversations he was having when he met friends and colleagues for coffee and just talked, person to person.
“That gap is huge,” Bazin says. “And I don’t think that’s good or healthy for anybody.”
Bhullar, a board-certified naturopathic doctor who also partners with Bazin on Social Experiment, a creative agency focused on experiential marketing, sees a similar dynamic. Social media was meant to be about “connection and camaraderie,” she suggests, but its relentless spotlight on success— often coming off as effortless and inevitable —can have the opposite effect. The beauty of FuckUp Nights, according to Bhullar, is that it tells you that you’re not alone. “The people you look up to—guess what?—they’re fucking up. They’re still figuring it out,” she says. “And that’s okay.
“What people have said to us after FuckUp Nights is that it feels like group therapy, which is great because I think everyone kind of needs that,” Bhullar explains.
After the speakers finish, Winnipeg FuckUp Nights continue with conversation, cocktails and the chance to hand out FuckUp cards (like business cards except you list your screwups). It’s informal, easygoing and fun—FUN is the organization’s acronym, after all—but these events also offer some serious ideas about how to make businesses and businesspeople better.
Fear of failure can be paralyzing. It can discourage people and companies from taking necessary risks. It can inhibit innovation. By bringing mistakes out into the open, by reframing failure as a tool for learning, growth and change, FuckUp Nights aim to build resilience and create supportive business relationships. At FuckUp Nights, attendees will hear about startups that didn’t start, projects that went bust, management styles that didn’t pan out and work-life balances that went careening off the rails. Speakers include CEOs, solopreneurs and small business owners, but as Bazin relates, “We do go outside of the business community. One of our first speakers was actually a comedian [Winnipeg funnyman and actor Emmanuel Lomuro].”
For upcoming FUN events, Bazin and Bhullar are looking to book artists and athletes, because these aren’t just bottom-line business lessons. They’re human stories that speak to universal experiences.
Doug Darling, the founder, CEO and executive creative director of Tripwire Media Group, knows the power of stories. The Tripwire team, which specializes in strategic storytelling and video and animation production, is trained in the neuroscience of attention and emotion, helping them craft stories that stick. That’s one of the reasons Darling was interested in bringing out some of his own cautionary tales at the second FuckUp Night, held back in June.
“In the world of storytelling, that’s called a teaching story, because you can learn from failure, sometimes in the best way,” Darling explains.
Corporate puffery can be off-putting and informational lectures can be dry, but honest, unvarnished stories about failure seem to reach people and resonate with them. Sharing your vulnerabilities, it turns out, is a great connector.
“When we learn from other people’s failure, we feel that a lot more,” Darling states. “Whether you’re on stage or watching, you see we have more in common than we don’t. I think that stays with people.”
Finally, some of the success of FuckUp Nights might be right there in the name. Just using the word “fuck” seems to loosen everyone up.
It makes for an atmosphere that feels “real, a little bit laid back,” Bhullar suggests. It’s easier to have honest conversations, she believes, “when you just came out of a room where someone said the F-word maybe 20 times and you laughed way more than you should at a networking business event.” “WHEN WE LEARN FROM OTHER PEOPLE’S FAILURE, WE FEEL THAT A LOT MORE.
WHETHER YOU’RE ON STAGE OR WATCHING, YOU SEE WE HAVE MORE IN COMMON THAN WE DON’T. I THINK THAT STAYS WITH PEOPLE.”
— Doug Darling, the founder, CEO and executive creative director of Tripwire Media Group, on bringing out some of his own cautionary tales at the second FuckUp Night.
