Entrepreneurship at the gates of vulnerability
A conversation on embracing failure with serial founder Julio Salazar
Julio Salazar is the co-founder of three businesses, including Impact Hub Mexico City and Fuckup Nights. In our conversation, we discuss what Julio learned on the path to becoming a serial entrepreneur and the challenges he had to overcome along the way.
The undercurrent to his work? His conviction that to create thriving organizations that nurture innovation and creativity, leaders must embody a deep sense of authenticity and a commitment to turning failure into a cultural design feature.
This article is published in Create Meaning’s Learning Series. Every month, we put the spotlight on one community member doing amazing impact work.
The reality is not the story
Julio Salazar is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Fuckup Nights, the innovation agency Cirklo, and Impact Hub Mexico City.
Becoming an entrepreneur, however, wasn’t self-evident. His father was an oil executive, known for having turned around and consolidated the operations of key markets in his 30+ years career.
He couldn’t fathom why Julio would choose a path of much uncertainty instead of following in his footsteps and pursuing a corporate career. “For my father, my decision to become an entrepreneur was like the wildest thing he could have ever imagined. And in my social circles, when I shared my ambition to become an entrepreneur, they thought I was unemployable. The social stigma was very strong at the time. It's incredible to see how today, everybody wants to be an entrepreneur.”
Even before he co-founded any of the three businesses, Julio intuited that corporate life wasn’t quite for him. Like the trickster, his gut instinct told him that some established norms needed to be broken — that a different world lay at the edges of convention. “My intuition chose to find like-minded peers with whom to bust the myths that were holding back innovation, creativity, and sustainability.”
What holds back innovation, Julio discovered, are often the stories entrepreneurs present about themselves to the outer world. Such stories don’t always do justice to the reality of being a founder and running a business — a reality that is often much more nuanced, challenging, and less polished than what appears on the outside.
Founders tend to identify with their companies, and any difficulty or failure, the story goes, directly depreciates their self-image. Julio had to transcend his own need for constant outer validation: “In the Fuckup Manifesto, there is a bullet that says, “If you're looking for validation, stop.” ... When I started as an entrepreneur, I upheld an image of how I wanted others to see me. I think that’s one of the difficulties that most entrepreneurs face. We want to come across as if we have our shit together. We believe that because we have decided to start or lead something, we always know the right answer — we will make the right decision.”
Julio’s turning point came when he found himself in a difficult situation. His company was about to run out of cash because of issues with a project’s deliverables. “I learned that when it all stacks up on you, you can either take the long route and try to tip around reality, or you can just face it. Ultimately, how you face it or how you decide to show up is what matters.”
Listen to Julio’s story about making tough decisions as an entrepreneur and showing up with vulnerability
Throughout his entrepreneurial journey, Julio has found a way to meet life on its own terms.
He has taken greater peace with allowing things to happen naturally rather than by constant force.
As a leader, he learned to share the weight of responsibility and invite his team into the process of decision-making. He has become more transparent with the challenges and setbacks he faces. “Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster. Some days you’re soaring high and feel incredible. Other days, you feel like you hit rock bottom. In moments when you are not as inspiring, not as motivational, not as energetic, the expectations you create for your company, or for yourself to be a hero or heroine, can weigh you down. I feel that in situations where I've confronted difficult decisions and chosen to be more authentic, it has led to challenging conversations, but ultimately allowed me to thrive.”
Julio learned to completely change his relation to failure — a process in which Fuckup Nights played a major role. “When we came up with this event concept, it was really for us as co-founders because we all had failed at some type of entrepreneurship. Even though we had known each other for two years, we thought that sharing what we had messed up in other businesses would be detrimental to how we value each other and perceive each other’s capacities. One evening, we asked each other, “Have you ever failed?” It was an incredible conversation, which led us to invite more people and speakers.”
By now, Fuckup Nights has turned into a global phenomenon, with more than a million attendees across 62 countries. But when it launched in 2014, the concept did not go off without a hitch. “At the time we hosted our first event, nobody wanted to talk about failure in public. I remember when we invited our first speakers and asked them to talk about their failures, they would look at us questioningly like, “What?”. When we explained the concept behind it, they were like, “Oh, all right. So it's like an Alcoholics Anonymous where I can offload my trauma?”
“Throughout the years, we have also learned that there are prevailing systems and power structures rooted in social constructions of race and gender. Speaking publicly about failure makes it much more difficult for individuals who have been disadvantaged and misrepresented by such social constructions. Today we are actively working on dismantling these beliefs, practices, and cultural norms.”
Failure as organizational culture
Nowadays, failure has become part of the business lingo. But are leaders truly practicing what they preach? Julio believes embracing failure is not a one-off performance — you have to build it into your organizational culture.
That’s why, besides hosting public events, Fuckup Nights consults startups and large companies to shift the culture around setbacks and how to manage them. “When failure is well managed within an organization, it can lead to innovative breakthroughs. When we ask leaders if they talk about failure within organizations, they say “yes” but when we ask “how”, they still struggle to articulate a clear system. Opening spaces and/or moments is the start, but how to maintain a continuous system is the challenge. Embracing failure becomes about leaders learning how to step up so it becomes less about their ego and more about systematizing learning from setbacks, for the benefit of the whole organization.”
Flip the tortilla
“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance; our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.”
— David Whyte, from Consolations
We tend to think of failure as something negative, but Julio encourages us “to flip the tortilla” — as they say in Mexico, and try to reframe failure as something positive; as an invitation to learn, let go, and grow.
“I have accepted that the last 10 years have been far from perfect. I know that there are failures that I'm not proud of, but I want to learn from them, hoping not to make them again. I want to be judged by my capacity to learn from failure, not by whatever I did to commit it.”
The awareness of the risk and uncertainty of entrepreneurship his father warned about hasn't left Julio. Like a stealthy predator, it still lurks behind every decision he makes. Sometimes those decisions hurt himself or others, but they also bolstered his drive to become an ever better leader. The failures along the way made him more resilient and more knowledgeable about what it takes to guide organizations to thrive. “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor”, attests Julio.
Julio — like all of us, is constantly engaged in an ongoing process of becoming. He continues to learn about the importance of holding vulnerability in difficult conversations and in making tough decisions. In his personal and professional life, he invites others to learn with him. “Sharing my experiences and hardships — and the wisdom I have gained from them — gives me a lot of power and joy. It's not easy, but doing so might make a difference to those on similar paths. My story is maybe not about the perfect way to show up, but about always figuring out the best ways to show up, despite the conditions.”