Baring all: Dubai entrepreneurs talk failure

Organic Press Juice cofounder Daniel Vahanian talks
failure with Moti Roti founder Tahir Shah. (Image
via Jacqueline Sofia)

The caffeine was flowing and the crowd was
a-buzz at Dubai’s first FUN event – but it wasn’t ‘fun’ everyone
had come to hear about.

The sold out Café Rider was stacked with people
wanting to hear tales of startup failure: what they did and how
they dealt with it.

FUN Dubai
or to give it its full name, FuckUp Nights Dubai, was an idea
hatched by Jay Menorca, owner events company Abregana, after
he saw the concept on social media.

“For the first year and a half of the business,
it’s been very hard for me, and I’ve been looking for someone to
talk to… a close group in the UAE that I can just vent out my
frustrations with and then move on to the next day,” Menorca said,
on his early experiences as an entrepreneur.  

Then one night he received an email asking if
he’d like to host FuckUp Nights in
Dubai, and on December 14 Menorca and a group of friends
launched it with the UAE-friendly name FUN Dubai (‘FuckUp Nights’
couldn’t get off the ground).

Menorca said the event wasn’t for
everyone.

“There were two to three speakers who first said
‘yes’ then said, ‘we don’t think that this event will be a good
image for our company, so we’re backing out’,” he said, adding that
they wanted people with grit who could bare everything before an
audience.

Baring their entrepreneur souls

FuckUp Nights is a global franchise and
community of entrepreneurs who share their stories of failure. The
first event started in Mexico in 2012, and has spread throughout
the world.

The evening’s line up featured the CEO
of GlamBox Nada
Zagallai, Osama Romoh of Digital Labs, Tahir Shah of
Moti Roti,
and Daniel and Chris Vahanian of Organic Press Juice (pictured
below, left to right. Image via Instagram).

Before baring their souls on stage, the Vahanian
brothers were quick to say their now-successful enterprise wasn’t
always as seamless as it looks.  

Chris said they spent 24,000 dirhams ($6,500
USD) on a website they never used. Daniel admitted his years
working in the construction industry contributed to an automatic
level of stress when problems arise.  

“I worked in construction for 10 years, and the
pressure on the construction site was twenty-four-seven,” he
said.

GlamBox’s Zagallai revealed a tendency to
micromanagement while at Saudi Arabia’s first online design concept
SadaShop.com, now closed.

It was 2009, when online purchasing was still
unknown territory in the Middle East, and her blinding ambition
fueled her into a continued spiral of micromanagement without any
knowledge base or outside expertise to back her up.

“I had no idea what I was doing most of the
time, but I felt like I had to do it anyway.”  

During the Q&A, an audience member asked
Zagallai what she would have done differently. She said people
should learn to “say things no matter what the consequences
are…call out red flags”.

Osama Romoh, founder of the now-shuttered
company Digital Labs, remembered going back to square one after
making the mistake of giving a majority share of his company to
another investor who failed to keep the company’s best interests in
mind.  

“I had to fire the whole team in one simple
meeting.”

Taher Shah, CEO and founder of Moti Roti, made a
180-degree turn when he went from working in IT at Nokia, to
opening a Pakistani “soul kitchen” in Dubai, and said a lot of his
trials stemmed from the costs of starting a business in the
UAE.

As one of the first food trucks in the country,
Shah quickly learned that “you can’t just rock up in a food truck”.
Dubai food trucks, including proper licensing and municipality
approvals, can
cost anywhere between $136,000 and
$545,000.

“In the old days, I had no resources. It was
down to just pure hustle,” he said.  

Shah still struggles but said Moti Roti would
not have grown to where it is today without failure.  He urged
the audience to understand that failure was part of being
human.

“That’s how we learn.  Failure is that
absolute building block.”

Failure can lead to a brighter
future

At the end of their talks, all of the
entrepreneurs agreed that their failures had ultimately led to
something greater.

After liquidating SadaShop.com, Zagallai thought
that was the end.  

“The embarrassment and pain climb over you,” she
said after the business folded after three years.

Then she got a call from the founding partners
of GlamBox which she leads today as CEO. She realized they saw
“immense value in epic failure”.

“GlamBox has been my redemption moment,” she
told Wamda after the event, adding that the company was scaling up
and making its debut in her old stamping ground of Saudi
Arabia.

She was careful to add that growth was almost
like starting up again – there’s always the fear of failure – but
noted that “we’re at the cliff and we need to jump off”.