ISLAMABAD – 25 JANUARY 2017: After a fun evening of forthright stories from Velocity’s startup founders in Lahore, DuckStories returned but this time in Islamabad at Telenor Headquarters – 345.
DuckStories is a series of regular events that share and celebrate mistakes and the times when things didn’t go quite according to plan. Although it is no secret that failure is one of the greatest teachers, the fear of failure is still the biggest blocker when it comes to innovation.
Telenor Velocity aims to eliminate this fear by nourishing a culture that makes it okay to celebrate failures and garner learning from such events. These honest admissions of failure cultivate a culture of experimentation, allowing an organization, startup or individual to be honest with themselves and others.
Telenor Velocity invites speakers to publicly admit to failure and examine it so that it distils the narrative to a case study from which other startups can learn. Although failure is a huge part of starting a business, in the world of startups, failure should not only be expected, but embraced and learned from.
In their second series of DuckStories, 6 speakers shared their stories and learnings with an audience that included startup founders, university students, working professionals, investors and mentors. These speakers were Usama Shahid-Founder & CEO of Meri Taleem, Sana Khalid-Founder of Minerva, Sameer Ahmed-Founder of Social Champ, Saima Khan-Founder of The Hampstead Kitchen, Obaidullah Khawaja-Head of Mobile Advertisement at Telenor Pakistan and Azm Dar-Category Lead Smart Homes at Telenor Pakistan.
Irfan Wahab Khan, CEO Telenor Pakistan, joined DuckStories and highlighted the importance of failure in extracting learnings and said,
“Fear of failure should never deter you from going for what you think you can achieve. There was a time when you couldn’t do a lot of things but you can do them now because you tried. At Telenor Pakistan, we encourage our people to come up with ideas and work on solutions without fear of failure. And since failures have big lessons for everyone, we help share and celebrate them through DuckStories so mistakes can be identified and learned from in the future.”
