Yet I think that while we europeans can learn a great deal of lessons from US entrepreneurs, the "failing is ok" is one of the wrong ones, together with the extreme optimism. In Europe there is a tradition of small businesses that succeeded because of wise moves and organic slow growing. Also if failing becomes less of a problem I've the feeling that many startups may start with ideas that are ways too risky. For sure less optimism and being failure-adverse will make us having less unicorns than the United States. However if you think it in different terms, this will also lead to having less ruined companies and bad moments for the people working there, because for every unicorn there are a huge number of companies failing, and it is not fun when it happens. After all the need for unicorns is because of investors, while people can be ok with small or medium sized companies that make them a good few million dollars to have happy lives.

> at the core of a worldwide movement - with an unprintable name that loosely correlates with "Failure Nights"

The name is FuckUp Nights if anybody is wondering

I prefer the term "embrace"... turning it into "celebration" risks making failure the goal. It is absolutely critical that people be allowed to fail. If people can't fail they won't take risk, and risk is where real innovation happens. But we should be careful not to turn failure into the new success.

Respect people who took a chance and failed. Learn from them. Embrace them. But I'd stop short at celebrating them. Save the celebration for next time (or 5th time) when you finally succeed and accomplish something amazing.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. I wish I knew more earlier about possible startup failure modes. Sadly only great successes are well communicated. Nobody writes about failure when partner got cold feet or development effort was greatly underestimated or product/market fit was miserable without room for pivoting.

During SXSW 2016, The Irish (specifically IDA Ireland) held an Irish Wake for Dead Startups. It was to hear people talk about failure and the lessons learned thereby.

As Canadian who spends a fair amount of time in Germany, I've always found German bankruptcy laws somewhat horrific. Although to be fair the idiots I've known that went bankrupt personally in Canada wouldn't have been able to do the same things in Germany they did in Canada.

Yes, Fuck Up Nights are not specific to Berlin or Germany, are they?

German startups are like American beer.

Since when has the BBC become squeamish about "unprintable" (which itself is a strange choice of word on the web, by a non-print publisher like the BBC no less) words like 'fuck'?

It's not like the haven't been using it before: https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=fuck