If at first you don’t succeed

F**kUp Nights Jerusalem encourages us to revel in failure.

By ARIEL DOMINIQUE HENDELMAN
Audience members ask questions at the November 3 event (photo credit: RICKY RACHMAN)
Audience members ask questions at the November 3 event
(photo credit: RICKY RACHMAN)
Bragging rights belong to whoever is most successful, right? Not necessarily – at least not one evening a month in Jerusalem during F**kUp Nights events.
F**kUp Nights is a global movement that began in Mexico in 2012, born of the concept that stories of failure are often more inspirational and motivational than stories of accomplishment.
Since its inception, the movement has become popular, with events in hundreds of cities worldwide.
F**kUp Nights Jerusalem launched this past June; the Tel Aviv branch began in January.
“The events came first to Tel Aviv and after I heard about it, I suggested it to PresenTense, who I work for, to bring it to Jerusalem,” Nir Cohen, F**kUp Nights volunteer event organizer says.
“PresenTense promotes entrepreneurship as empowerment and we work with another organization called Siftech, an NGO promoting tech entrepreneurship in Jerusalem. Our first event was an instant hit. We want people to understand that failure is legitimate and part of the story. We want to encourage people to take risks in the social and tech fields. We look at entrepreneurship in the broader sense. It’s incredible the way people like the concept.”
The November 3 event featured four speakers: Michal Shilor of The Jerusalem Intercultural Center, David Ehrlich of Tmol Shilshom cafe, Nir Hirshman of Nirshman’s PR and Helen Wexler of JNext.
Shilor spoke about “A View from East Jerusalem,” a project she began a year and a half ago to translate east Jerusalem media into Hebrew and English.
“The idea is to bring different narratives to the mainstream; not necessarily to agree with them, but to be aware,” Shilor states.
“I spoke about something that happened a couple of months after we went on air. We started seeing a lot of incitement and hatred on the pages that we were following from east Jerusalem. We didn’t want to add to the cycle of hate, and we let panic overtake us. So that would be the f**k-up – we let panic misguide us in our judgment. We almost closed the page, but a couple of weeks later, the first stabbing attack happened. We realized that we foreshadowed what was going to happen. Had we not let the panic consume us, we might have been able to alert people and do something about it.”
The lesson for Shilor was the realization that “A View from East Jerusalem” is a powerful tool that people can utilize to affect daily occurrences. Thus, within the failure was a lesson. Shilor cites one of the ways that she knows she has overcome the failure of the past as the effectiveness of the translations of a big campaign in East Jerusalem now concerning cleaning up the garbage from dumpsters not being emptied often enough.
“Our page can bring to the forefront all the issues that are happening in east Jerusalem, which really helps to create change.”
November’s event also featured Helen Wexler, the only English speaker. Wexler was studying architecture at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design when she came up with an idea with three other students for an app called Drops. Drops featured what is known as a-synchronic communication. Users left messages for people at specific locations around the city, but the message was revealed only when the recipient physically arrived at the location.
“You can think of it like digital graffiti,” Wexler explains. “We convinced deans from other departments to give us students to work on the project for credits, so we had an amazing team of developers and videographers working with us. We even convinced the president of Bezalel to give up IP rights to the project.”
Wexler and her team got to work on the app. Then the semester came to an end, along with their access to free developers. They were eager to launch and realized that the Bezalel Public Relations department wanted to promote Drops.
“We were getting headlines like ‘The Israeli app that will compete with Whatsapp!’ and ‘Never forget to buy milk at the supermarket again!,’” Wexler says. “We were getting thousands of downloads a day; our app ranking shot up. But bad reviews were piling in. It was eating up people’s battery life. Users wrote that it was a nice idea, but it doesn’t work.
“Things spiraled out of control. As the possibility of investment came closer, team dynamic challenges were exacerbated. If we were getting an investment and becoming a real company, we needed a CEO. Multiple team members were giving away business cards saying that they were the CEO. We ran it more like a school project than a start-up company.”
Wexler found a lesson within the failure that she took with her on to future successes: to define clear team roles from the beginning.
She says that there is such a thing as launching too early; in her experience, it would have been better to have played with Drops more and looked for bugs systematically before launching.
“Life after failure isn’t so bad,” Wexler states. “Thanks to my experience at Drops, I now call myself an archi-tech working at the intersection of architecture and technology. I won an Award from NASA for my proposal for 3D printed houses on Mars. Drops led me to my first job outside of architecture.”
F**kUp Nights Jerusalem draws between 100 and 150 attendees to every event. The venue differs each month, with past locations including The Tower of David and Muslala. December’s event will be held at Beit Hansen. In this way, the event enlivens a multitude of venues around the city, as diverse as the speaker selection.
There are always four featured speakers; the dedicated team of 12 volunteers ensures that they come from the tech and social worlds and represent a wide range of failures.
“We bring in speakers from a spectrum of professions,” Cohen says. “We’ve had a chef, the CEO of the Justice Ministry; everyone gives their own perspective on failure. Some bring a more personal story and some bring a more professional point of view. We try not to train them too much before they speak because we want them to take it wherever they want to go. What’s unique about the events in Jerusalem, as opposed to Tel Aviv, is the range of different people who attend: young, old, haredi, secular. It’s really a mix of Jerusalem faces.”
The Jerusalem chapter recently added something new at the end of events: an open mic. When speakers finish, the audience gets a 10-minute break. Then the stage and microphone are open to anyone who wants to share experiences. Cohen says the open mic works well. “It’s a relief to share a failure story; it’s something most of us don’t often do. We usually like to talk about our successes. This is something that brings a different angle and people relate to that.”
The organizers plan on doing an event soon entirely in English for the Anglo community The motto: “Fail your way to success.”
Cohen summarizes, “We hear from people with different backgrounds, but the one common theme is to take a risk, and even if it’s not successful, it’s okay. It’s part of learning.”
More info: www.facebook.com/funJerusalem/?fref=ts fuckupnights.com