“Fail Night”: Social entrepreneurial failure at the Körber Forum
2026-01-02 Failed but still optimistic! Four social entrepreneurs reported on and discussed their biggest entrepreneurial challenges at the Körber Forum Hamburg.
On November 17, the Körber Forum in Hamburg hosted “Fail Night” under the motto “Failed but still optimistic.” At the invitation of the Körber Foundation and the Hamburg Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship, the Leuphana Social Innovation Community was also represented by Robert Hoyer. Up to 90% of all startups fail within the first five years after their founding. The risk in social enterprises is even higher, as they want to maximize their social impact in addition to their economic viability. This makes it all the more important that Fail Night brought the topic of failure to the big stage. To this end, four Hamburg-based founders of social startups gave unvarnished accounts of their biggest social entrepreneurial failures and the lessons they learned from them.
Among the speakers were well-known names such as Waldemar Zeiler, serial entrepreneur and “meaning entrepreneur” (e.g., Einhorn or, more recently, Ding Dong Ping Pong), as well as Ulrike Dobelstein-Lüthe and Florian Schleinig, both from Redezeit für dich, and Svenja Weber, managing director of Dialoghaus Hamburg, which filed for insolvency under its own responsibility at the beginning of the year. After the four guests first “pitched” their own failures individually in 10 minutes, the panel discussed failure and the culture of mistakes in Germany with all the guests. While in many other countries, entrepreneurial failure is seen as an important experience for later success, failure continues to be stigmatized in Germany. This is a situation that, in the opinion of all participants, needs to change.
The evening offered the audience a deep, authentic insight behind the façade of social start-ups. For the audience, it was an inspiring reminder that failure is part of a courageous start-up journey and that optimism, perseverance, and the willingness to try again are among the most important forces. That is why the Leuphana Social Innovation Community does not ignore the failure of social enterprises and actively seeks to understand this phenomenon in order to minimize the costs of failure and maximize the learning effects in the future.
