Telenor Velocity’s DuckStories are inspiring stories of professional and entrepreneurial failure. The platform allows entrepreneurs to talk about their upsets and to walk listeners through the process of learning from failures and early mistakes. Through DuckStories, Telenor Velocity helps entrepreneurs in learning how to use failure as the motivation to succeed.
After the success of this year’s episode featuring a conversation between Irfan Wahab Khan, CEO Telenor Pakistan and Muneeb Maayr, the CEO and founder of Bykea on more intelligent segmentation for startups, Telenor Velocity sat down with two more inspirational speakers and successful CEOs and asked them to talk about why and how they have failed in the past. This episode featured two special guests: Zouhair Khaliq, co-founder, partner, Teamup and Parvez Abbasi, Director National Incubation Centre. They both share untold stories of their successes and failures that they learned from, and from those stories, we have compiled a list of the top five lessons on how to launch startups the right way that will help you on your journey.
1. Timing must match the ambition
Coming up with good ideas is not enough but coming up with them at the right time is what sets you apart from others, according to Zouhair Khaliq. He explained his personal experience in generating ideas that had been too ahead of time and failed to garner enough confidence from investors simply because the timing was wrong. Zouhair talks about acting immediately on ideas and sometimes holding back temporarily because someone else may have already carried that idea forward. There can be lessons in waiting and observing other people’s mistakes before making our own.
2. Find the right partners or co-founders
Parvez Abbasi talks about his lessons in choosing partners for your business and shines the light on the importance of disagreement. He talks about the differences in personalities of partners that can define the success of a company. If you and your business partner agree on everything, there won’t be any space for growth. It would help if you always strived to look for a business partnership that adds value to your personality instead of mirroring it.
3. Do not repeat mistakes
Zouhair Khalid stressed the importance of re-adjusting your strategy to deal with particularly tough challenges when asked about failing through mistakes. Indeed, mistakes shouldn’t scare you, but repeating the same ones shows inadequacy. If faced with errors and failure, learn from them, and accept the change that those mistakes bring along with them.
4. Find the right people
Talking about the importance of building the right team of people, Parvez Abbasi argues that there are two kinds of people in the functioning of a business; those who find solutions and those who see only problems. Parvez advises the company of the former, as they inspire positivity and can solve problems instead of bringing the company morale down with them.
5. Failures are opportunities
When asked about his most significant business failures, Parvez Abbasi presents the idea of looking at failure as an opportunity to learn from. He believes that you have failed only when you’ve given up on trying. If you are failing and re-adjusting strategies and rolling up your sleeves once again for another try, you haven’t failed. Parvez Abbasi presents a unique view of failure that many entrepreneurs can benefit from simply by shifting their perspective on learning. He emphasises you can’t succeed without ‘failure’, but it’s equally important to learn from that failure.
This month’s episode of DuckStories featured much more valuable information and many more personal accounts of success and failure from Parvez and Zouhair. The episode is available on Telenor Pakistan’s YouTube channel here.
