Business Lessons in Failure as Told by Founders to Founders in The Tech Ecosystem
Lekki, Lagos – Fail Forward serves to play a pivotal role in the tech ecosystem as startup founders, startup teams, tech enthusiasts and other stakeholders converge for the second edition of Fail Forward.
FAIL FORWARD event is a platform for start-up founders to share their failure-to-success stories and inspire other startup entrepreneurs in the tech ecosystem to learn from their experiences and build successful brands.
Speakers will share their unique failure story, highlighting what went wrong, how they dealt with it, what they could have done differently and their advice to entrepreneurs in their industry or that stage of business.
Speakers for this event are Sheriff Shittu, Founder and CEO, GetDev.co, Onyeka Akumah, Founder and CEO FarmCrowdy, Femi Iromini, Cofounder & CEO of Turbo.
There would also be Fail Forward breakout labs for participants to discuss carefully selected startup failure stories and localize learning to be shared with all afterwards.
After the event, there are networking opportunities available with the speakers and other participants.
The event will be held on Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 53, Oladipo Bateye Rd, Ikeja GRA, Ikeja, in Lagos, Nigeria.
Between 50 and 70 people will attend the event as participants.
Fail Forward will also attract representatives from co-working spaces, VCs, developers, students, the general public, and media.
The Gap Fail Forward is Bridging in The Tech Industry
Failure is still a taboo word in our tech ecosystem. As much as we try to model our ecosystem on Silicon, our attitude towards Failure is extremely different from Silicon Valley, where the popular Mantra “Fail Fast, Fail often” describes a community that embraces failure.
This can be largely attributed to a cultural tendency of conflating a failure event with the failure of self.
To people around, if your startup failed, it is a pointer to a character flaw, an ineffectiveness of personal principles or some other diminishing trait.
In 2015, Fortune estimated that nine of ten startups will fail and in 2016, Huffington post said it was 95%.
There has been little or no research on the rate of failure among African Startups, however, Stanbic IBTC once claimed that over 80% of Nigerian startups fail within their first five years.
In other climes, many founders of failed startups tend to share their experience, probably partly as catharsis, but also so other would-be entrepreneurs can learn from their mistakes.
However, startup founders sometimes need to fail in order to find their way to success, while many budding founders coming behind them need to learn from the specific failure lessons in their journey to avoid the same pitfalls.
The Fail Forward platform seeks to fill this gap by carefully curating and sharing African tech failure stories.
Our focus is to extend the Nigerian start-up conversation to include failures and how to plot forward.
The core objectives of this event are:
- To empower startups and tech enthusiasts with practical failure stories from African startups that can be valuable lessons for them
- To learn from renowned and experienced tech entrepreneurs on various business pitfalls and how to bounce back from failure
- Host Fail Forward breakout labs for participants to discuss carefully selected startup failure stories and localize learning to be shared with all afterwards
- Facilitate networking opportunities with speakers and other participants
Outcome of the event
- Establish a network of African startups and other stakeholders who will be able to work together to find creative solutions tackling common failure pitfalls in businesses
- Curate failure stories from African startups and highlight lessons to be shared.
Registration for Fail Forward 2.0
The Fail Forward Event is FREE and is primarily targeted at start-up founders, tech enthusiasts, start-up teams, SMEs, young professionals looking to invest in tech, students, VCs and other stakeholders.
To register for the event, visit this link for an enlightening experience
About The Fail Forward Team
Fail Forward is led by a group of experienced professionals, keen to see the maturity of the startup ecosystem by taking on the task of documenting the stories around failures in the African startup journey.
