Richard Joannides, founder Verita International School: ”Failure is not the problem. The problem is how many times you try to reach your goal. I think you should seek out those problems, because they help you build a better product, a better service, a better company. Don’t worry about your failures. Once you have the job you want, no one will remember the 50 failures you had”
Bucharest, 11th December 2025: Fuckup Nights, the global series of events organised in Bucharest by the communication agency DiFine PR, returned on November 20 with stories full of emotion and inspiration for those who don’t see failure as a dead end. Fuckup Nights Bucharest, its 27th edition, took place at the Bucharest International School of Management (BISM). The event brought to the stage a variety of speakers from different fields, all sharing the common courage to learn from the challenges they have faced.
Richard Joannides – founder of Verita International School, Aleodor Tabarcea – engineering manager at Stripe, and Lavinia Chițu – Romanian Sign Language interpreter, shared on the Fuckup Nights Bucharest stage the failures from their careers and how these experiences contributed to their personal and professional growth.
Richard Joannides shared a different kind of failure story: the moment he realised that corporate success was actually steering him away from the life he wanted. He understood that continuing on the same path would only take him further from a sense of purpose. He didn’t want to work in a corporation again and asked himself what he truly enjoyed doing. Inspired also by his own sons, who were unhappy at school in Romania, he realised that what he loved most was children. He reflected on his own journey and wondered why he had to reach the age of 40 to learn about balance, well-being, and why children aren’t taught these things from a young age, perhaps even in an organised system like the school environment.
He then decided to build a school himself – Verita International School – one that would teach children to solve problems independently, to think critically, and ultimately, to learn how to learn. Over time, the school grew, and the demand from parents increased, prompting him to realise he needed to expand. He acquired land and envisioned an ambitious project for new campuses that would raise the standard of private education in Romania. During this process, he faced complex operational and bureaucratic challenges that tested his resilience.
“This moment of uncertainty pushed me to look for partners who shared the same vision. I met the Duke educational group, told them the whole story, and they said: ‘We like your dream. We like your vision. Let’s move forward together.’ It is the best decision I’ve ever made,” says Richard Joannides, founder of Verita International School.
În prezent, Școala Verita dezvoltă două noi campusuri moderne care respectă standardele nZEB (emisii aproape zero), un proiect în valoare de zeci de milioane de euro, care va transforma școala – cu cei 2.500 de elevi ai săi – în cea mai mare școală privată din România.
“If you can control your mind, regulate your emotions, everything is within you. Most worries do not turn out to be as serious as you think. The story you tell yourself in your mind is the one that torments you. One of the things I had to learn was how to deal with this commentary of my mind, which constantly exaggerates”, adds Richard Joannides.
If he were to analyze the general role of failure, he would say: “Failure is not the problem. The problem is how many times you try to reach your goal, how many iterations you can have, how many attempts you can make. I think you should seek out those problems, because they help you build a better product, a better service, a better company. Don’t worry about your failures. Once you have the product, once you have the service, once you have the job you want, no one will remember the 50 failures you had”, says Richard Joannides.
Engineering manager Aleodor Tabarcea shared an experience from when he became a manager for the first time, at the age of 24. Initially, he led a team of five people—engineers and designers – and then it grew to 12. They were all working intensely and soon ended up managing 16 large projects at the same time. He felt they were doing a great job, and at the end of the year, he went to ask his superior for salary raises for his team, confident in the effort they had put in throughout the year.
However, he had not documented the entire workload and had nothing concrete to prove all the effort involved. In February, when the raises were supposed to be approved, his superior told him that the results achieved by his team were not clear. The intense workload had led to a paradox, he says: he worked so much that he no longer took the time to communicate his team’s outcomes.
“In this whole process, I failed the company. I didn’t manage to communicate the work I had built alongside my team. Secondly, I failed myself—massively. For weeks, for months, I didn’t find the time to take a step back, to be creative, to understand and see how, in fact, I should build a healthy culture, a healthy community, a healthy team. And last but not least, if I’m completely honest, I failed the team entirely. As long as the impact of what you create isn’t visible and appreciated, in the end, the work is in vain”, says Aleodor Tabarcea, Engineering Manager Stripe.
He looked back, understood what he did wrong, and started again, going on to hold managerial positions in other companies.
“This part about getting back up after a failure is a skill that not only you need to develop in order to go through life in a healthy way, but it becomes a fundamental point—a necessity. The ability to look at and see your failure, and at the same time think creatively about how to approach it, gives you the capacity to become better”, adds Aleodor.
Romanian Sign Language interpreter and artist Lavinia Chițu shared how she began translating music for deaf people and how she kept moving forward despite the rejections she received from concert and festival organizers in Romania. The daughter of deaf parents, she realized from childhood that she had a mission – to be the voice of the deaf community. At the age of 12, after receiving a record player from her father, she began translating folk music from vinyl records for her parents. It was the first time they could understand the lyrics of a song.
In 2014, she began translating music on her social media accounts and noticed that there was demand for such content from the deaf community in Romania. She saw how concerts in the United States had been offering live translation for deaf people for decades and couldn’t understand why event organizers in her country didn’t understand the need to make music accessible. She wrote numerous emails offering her services to translate concerts into Romanian sign language and received a long series of rejections.
The rejections seemed like a failure. But she continued to believe in the importance of her work. In 2019, she managed to make the first concert in Romania accessible. It was only the first step, followed by festivals and concerts by famous artists from Romania (Delia, Irina Rimes, Theo Rose, Horia Brenciu, Macanache, Subcarpați) and abroad (Coldplay, Jessie J, Lenny Kravitz, Rita Ora, Passenger, Sam Smith, Katie Melua, The National, and others).
If she were to give advice to those who feel like giving up after a failure, it would be this: “Believe in yourselves, because we each have a mission on this planet. Because we didn’t come here just to leave, because we have to pass things on, because we have to make history, and because we must be a role model. Even if sometimes we fall – and fall terribly -we must get back up. With patience, with kindness, with love in our hearts, and always with a smile on our faces”, says Lavinia Chițu.
The 27th edition of Fuckup Nights Bucharest has come to an end, but a new event is coming in January. At FUN XXVIII, new guests will take the stage with valuable experiences and lessons, where failure gives birth to stories worth sharing further.
Fuckup Nights Bucharest is part of the global event series held in 62 countries around the world, challenging the way we think about failure in our careers. It is equally relevant to small and large entrepreneurs, corporate professionals, freelancers, and students.
A few of the previous editions of Fuckup Nights Bucharest can be seen here: Vol I, Vol II, Vol III, Vol VI, Vol X, Vol XII.
Event partners: BISM (Bucharest International School of Management), Radio Guerrilla, Complice, Centrul EKA, Vitamin Aqua, Bizilive, Psychologies, IQAds, SMARK, IQool, Revista CARIERE, Techcelerator, ROTSA – Romanian Tech Startups Association, SCENTA.
Tickets are available through iabilet.ro.
More details about the event can be found on Facebook, Instagram și LinkedIn.
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About DiFine PR
DiFine PR is a full-service communication agency that combines over 20 years of national and international experience with the satisfaction of creating successful stories. In addition to offering complete PR, communication, and business consulting services, the agency also organizes major tech and business events (e.g. NASA Space Apps Challenge, TechFest, Fuckup Nights Bucharest).
Its client portfolio includes NN, Stefanini, TH Essers, GapMinder VC, Techcelerator, ROTSA (Romanian Tech Startups Association), Contakt, Goldring, Klass Wagen, Eyerim, Bricklofts, Dulcinella, Undelucram.ro, Restart Energy, Tema Energy, Verita International School, Bitcoin Romania. Over the six years since its launch, DiFine PR has worked with more than 250 technology startups.
