Breaking the ice – Let's chat about startup failure with StartupAmsterdam and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

While conducting research for StartupAmsterdam, PhD researcher Sarah Herzog concluded, and all ecosystem stakeholders agreed: We need to talk more about failure! Hence, we invite you to join us for a candid conversation: "Breaking the Ice. Let's chat about startup failure", guided by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. We will dedicate the afternoon to discussing Amsterdam's failure culture and support systems and brainstorming points of improvement. Afterwards, we will wrap up the evening with drinks, snacks and good ol' networking at one of Amsterdam's liveliest hubs.

Why do we need to talk about failure?

Even though the Dutch ecosystem has raised numerous unicorns in the last years, rather silently, more than 50% of startups failed within their first five years. While failure can be a learning opportunity for the entrepreneur, for these learning benefits to manifest, entrepreneurs need to start again. 

However, failure is often a disheartening experience that incurs numerous social, psychological, and financial costs for entrepreneurs, impacting one's ability and inclination to start up again. Thus, we want to foster a safety net in Amsterdam's local startup community in which the cultural attitude and formal regulations do not punish failure too much, and support is provided. 

In the first phase of the "Re-start Amsterdam" programme, we have spoken to more than 50 ecosystem stakeholders to learn from their failure experiences and their perceptions about the local failure culture and support gaps. 

In the next phase, we would like to share our learnings with the broader ecosystem and discuss how we can take the first steps in mitigating the most pressing support gaps. 

Together we want to build an ecosystem in which failure does not mean the end of an entrepreneur's career but a valuable learning experience on the road to success.