My Favourite Failure: Losing £500k on an event that should’ve been the start of my new career - Amanda Brock

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0:38A state actor charmed them into stealing the company's flagship software, which they then took to the state-owned business instead, costing the company billions. If you want to get a better handle on your security, the Secure Innovation campaign can help. Check out npsa.gov.uk forward slash innovation and download their free quick start guide. There's a link in the show notes. It meant that we were left with something that became unviable. So we obviously had to go back and explain that, as I know many people have had to in different organisations to our funders. That really is a devastating situation where we weren't able to take it forward.

1:25That's Amanda Brock, the CEO of Open UK, which advocates for open technology like open source software. She's now firmly embedded in the startup and tech ecosystem, but it took her a decade too long to jump from her legal career to what she really craved, the risk-reward frenzy of entrepreneurship. She stayed in law too long because she'd experienced a sobering failure years ago, running an event which lost half a million pounds.

2:01Amanda spent 25 years in law, but she'd always dreamt of something more entrepreneurial. She had side projects, including running Scottish art exhibitions. Their success saw her appointed as the creative director for a big event, which she hoped would be the launchpad to leave law. We had a Scottish festival and we held it in the Inns of Court in central London. It was in the inner temple. And we had all things Scottish, which ranged from a shopping village to a music festival to celebrity chefs in a tent doing cooking demos, a book festival. Gosh, everything and anything that you can imagine.

2:40It was a huge event by content. Amanda thought the inaugural edition would be the start of an event that would happen for years to come.

3:13our strategy just wasn't right and it didn't come to fruition. And we didn't realize or we did realize and panic, but we didn't execute on that realization quickly enough. And we allowed it to continue to run and run without selling tickets. And by the time we got to the stage of giving them away, we were so close to the event, we just didn't get bombs on seats. And I think there are different elements to that, right? There's making sure that you understand what your key deliverables are. There's knowing when to accept, defeat and pivot and to work out alternate strategies, all which have been learnings for me since then.

3:57But it does have me as somebody who still organizes events, sitting in dread of ever having an event with nobody there. Surely they could have got bums on seats by giving away tickets, no? We absolutely did. And we were almost dragging people in off the street. And everybody who was there had a phenomenal time because we had really created something incredibly special. But there's a moment in Field of Dreams, the movie. I don't know even if your audience will all know Field of Dreams. I don't know if it's iconic enough to have carried through generations. But there is a moment where there's a line that is, if you build it, they will come.

4:34That's not true. And that was a learning for us. And I've seen it in a number of businesses and startups that I've advised over the years where they will come, but they will only come if they're aware of it. And you need to make sure that there's a way for them to be aware of it, whether that's a comms strategy or whether that is getting the word out in the street yourself. I mean, it gets to a point where you are publicizing and promoting via social media, which obviously wasn't so strong back then, via other media outlets and streams and through networks and things in a way to ensure that your event is successful when you run an event, if you're not where you should be on ticket sales.

5:24and I think that that's something that I've learned the hard way you mentioned you know do I still do events I have an event on the 6th and 7th of February in London where I'm hoping we'll have a thousand people it's year two so year one was super successful and the learning that I had from that failed event sort of 17 years ago was a big part of it where in terms of selling tickets It's getting people through the door. You know, we had a very, we organised it very quickly, but we had a very expansive strategy. And that strategy not only involved us, but it's a community driven event, but bringing in lots of people around us in a community who have a vested interest in it, who also want to help us promote it.

6:10The failure had a profound effect on Amanda's career. And I didn't get to continue doing something that I hoped I would be moving to do probably full time. So on a personal level, I had planned to leave law and to pursue a career in that space. In the end, I left law 10 years later, I think. So for me, I got my fingers burned and was less confident about making a shift that I knew I had to do. And for me, it's been a shift that's allowed me to use skills and talent that I couldn't use and the constraints of the legal profession that I was in. So on a personal level, no financial problem, but I guess a problem in as much as I wasn't able to progress my career and didn't have the confidence for some time to go and find something else.

7:10We're not very good at failure in the UK, right? We don't really like it. If I was in the Bay Area and I was talking to people about that. They would expect me to say, yeah, I had a startup and it failed. We lost this much money, but I learned X, Y, Z from it. I won't do that again. I might make other mistakes because I'm going to push the boundaries, but I won't do that same mistake again. I've learned from it. So I can assure you there will be people at my event in May, in May if I got the month right. I can assure you there'll be people at my event in February because we will make sure that the people are there one way or another.

7:42That's a learning, you know, job done. However, there are different things every time you iterate, every time you do something new that you have to watch out for and learn. And I think if you stop having at least small failures, you're not taking risks. And risk is something that I think we're bad in the UK at failing. And I think we're bad at taking risk. And risk is almost a dirty word in the UK. And it shouldn't be because risk is something. It's not a gamble. It's not a problem. It's not an addiction. risk is something that we ought to be able to assess and consider so you need to have all your facts you need to be able to understand the implications of those facts and then make a decision that's reflective of your tolerance of risk and i i think oh that's risky puts people off in the uk where oh that's risky how can we make it work is probably what they would say to you in the bay area and i think there needs to be more of a shift in that and i think i've I've probably come back a bit from that being burned around the festival to be more confident about taking calculated risks.

8:50So what would she tell someone who's just experienced a failure? I think a lot of it is about understanding what the cause of the failure was and why. Possibly not beating yourself up about it. I was just thinking, sorry, in my head I was sidetracking slightly. There's Solomon Higgs, who was the founder of Docker, lost a hell of a lot of money. And I think about 300 million off the top of my head. I was talking to him in San Francisco about eight months ago, nine months ago, we were having dinner. And he was really there taking accountability and ownership for what had happened. Yet he's got a new startup dagger that's doing brilliantly.

9:36And I think that part of it is that ability to sit back and reflect and realize that some of the best people running the best businesses in the world have failed. Because if they haven't failed, they haven't tried hard enough. It's an inevitability. You know, you've got to grow with the jobs. Some are more lucky than others. Often when you speak to people who've done super well, they will tell you that they've had lots of lucky breaks along the way. and I think there is a period of time where you need to go and lick your wounds and regroup and regather your thoughts but getting back out there getting back on the horse quickly which I didn't do I think is really important and if I was advising myself now looking back on that all those years ago it would have been not to have been so cautious afterwards and to have got back out into another startup more quickly.

10:36Amanda Brock, who also says there are very few things that can't be fixed apart from serious illness. Wise words, so back yourself. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. See you next time.