A curated evening for humans in tech — real stories, honest lessons, and the connections worth making. Built on truth over performance.
Failing Forward is a monthly evening in Lisbon where remarkable humans in tech take the stage — not to perform success, but to share the full picture. The pivots, the wrong bets, the things that broke before they worked.
It's a deliberately designed space: one strong story, a room full of curious people, and enough time to actually talk. We keep it small so everyone leaves having had at least one real conversation.
Whether you're a founder, engineer, product manager, or researcher — if you build things with technology and you're curious about how others do it, this is your room.
Just real journeys, real failures, real lessons.
Invite-only, curated audience. Everyone there has a reason to be.
Mystery recruiters, collaborations, introductions — born in the room, not on a job board.
Live polls, roundtables, speed connections. Nobody hides in the corner.
One speaker. One story. Real, specific, and unfiltered. What they built, what broke, and what they'd do differently.
Live polls, lightning insights, roundtables. What people really think, in real time.
A surprise drop — jobs, gigs, and opportunities.
Five-minute rounds. Three to five connections you actually wanted to make.
Guided prompts, small groups. No "so what do you do?"
Tech isn't one job title. Everyone in the room shapes technology from a different seat, and it all boils down to three overarching categories.
The people who make the thing: engineers, designers, researchers, founders. They decide what gets built and what gets left out.
The people who put it into the world: product and operations leads, managers, policy and procurement, anyone choosing where a tool lands and who it touches.
The people who live with it every day. Their experience is the real test of whether any of it worked.
Honest, curious, open-minded and mindful humans — all identities, all ages, all cultural backgrounds across the spectrum.
The human behind the career
Featuring Clara Bernardes (Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer of Biorce — "the Re-builder") and Ivo Bernardo (Co-Founder and Senior Data Scientist of DareData — "Anti-fluff crusader"). Come for the story, stay for the conversation.
Featuring Isabel Carapeta (Forbes "30 under 30", CEO at Simplifier) and Patricia Pires (Communication & Change Manager, Innovation & Engineering HUB).
Coverage of the launch, with founders Melissa Carvalho and Hayarpi Antonyan and AIP's Marta Barbosa Cabral on fear, silence, and learning from failure in Portugal's innovation ecosystem.
Read the article →Announcement of the monthly series and its inaugural session, "Connecting the Dots," with speakers Isabel Carapeta and Patrícia Pires.
Read the article →
EU Attorney and certified AI Governance Professional. Melissa translates complex regulation into human language — and brings that same clarity to the conversations she curates.
Strategy and PMO lead with six years across startups and corporates in Europe. Arpi brings the structure that makes things actually happen — and the international perspective that makes them interesting.
Failing Forward runs on community energy. Whether you want to speak, sponsor, suggest someone, or simply show up and be part of the room — there's a meaningful role for you.
We're deliberately lean: no ad spend, no agency, no corporate gloss. Everything that works here works because real people made it work.
You don't need to have made it to belong on stage. You need a real story — something you built, broke, or learned the hard way. No keynote experience required.
We work with one sponsor per event — the Mystery Recruiter Partner. Exclusive access, real conversations, and genuine talent connections rather than a logo on a slide deck.
We rely on community recommendations to find speakers who wouldn't normally put themselves forward. Know someone with a real story? Send them our way.
Have a space in Lisbon that could host 30–40 people for an evening? We'd love to hear from you. Venues become part of the experience — always a good one.
Fill in the form and one of the organizers will get back to you personally. We read everything.