Success usually gets told from the finish line. Fuckup Nights YYC is interested in everything that happened along the way.
In 2019, Amanda Ovaici and Shahr Smed brought Fuckup Nights to Calgary with a shared belief that some of the most valuable stories in business are the ones people rarely talk about. The wrong turns, failed ideas, difficult decisions, unexpected setbacks, and lessons learned when things simply didn’t go as planned.
Amanda, as a lawyer and entrepreneur and Shahr as a venture capitalist with Plug and Play, had both seen firsthand that the road to success is rarely as polished as it appears. Behind the milestones are risks, uncertainty, mistakes, and plenty of moments where the outcome was anything but guaranteed.
Inspired by the importance of failure, they created a Calgary stage where founders, entrepreneurs, executives, creators, and community leaders could leave the highlight reel behind and talk about what really happened.
These are stories about celebrating failure. They’re about what comes after it. The pivot. The perspective and the lessons that you couldn’t have learned any other way.
Today, Fuckup Nights YYC is a community built around candid conversations, shared experiences, and being real about the journey.
Because sometimes the part that went wrong is the part worth hearing.
What to Expect at Fuckup Nights
- Four speakers sharing one defining fuckup and what they learned from it.
- 7 to 10 minute stories packed with honesty, humour, and hard earned lessons.
- Connection and conversation with Calgary’s entrepreneurial community.
Real stories. Real lessons. No highlight reel.
Next event – February 4, 2027
Tickets on Showpass
Meet Our Upcoming Fuckuppers
April Hicke – Founder & CEO, Toast
April is the Founder and CEO at Toast, a tech enabled talent partner dedicated to increasing gender diversity within the tech industry. With over 15 years of experience in leadership, change management, and strategic team development, she’s a Certified Change Practitioner, Top 40 Under 40 honouree, TED speaker, and social innovation enthusiast. Today, she leads the business with a long-term growth mindset, driving strategic direction, building strong stakeholder relationships, and refining market strategies to maximize impact and scalability. Her role is focused on steering the company toward sustainable success through bold vision and purposeful execution.
Her core value and mission is to make a difference by disrupting the status quo and inspiring people to think outside the box, reimagine the possible, and act like owners. April is a serial relationship builder, a savvy problem solver, and an exclamation mark personality. She devotes a great deal of her time coaching emerging leaders and fostering psychological safety within teams.
Sean Stinson – President, Blackline Safety
Sean Stinson has spent more than a decade helping build Blackline Safety from a small Canadian technology company into a global leader in connected industrial safety, and one of the fastest growing companies in North America. An engineer by training and now President of the company, he’s led teams across product, customer operations, sales, and international expansion, helping navigate the challenges that come with rapid growth, public markets, and constant change.
But that’s only the highlight reel.
Like every leader who’s spent enough time in the arena, Sean has made decisions that didn’t work, trusted the wrong instincts, and learned that experience is often just another name for surviving failure. Some of the moments that shaped him most never appeared in an annual report or a LinkedIn post.
At Fuckup Nights YYC, Sean is pulling back the curtain on one of those decisions, what went wrong, what came next, and the lessons that followed.
Leena Yousefi – Founder, YLaw
Leena Yousefi is a multi-award-winning lawyer, mediator, and the founder of YLaw, the largest female-owned law firm in Canada, with three offices across British Columbia and a team of over 60 employees. She is widely recognized as an innovator in the legal profession, having set out to reimagine both the practice and business of law.
In her relentless pursuit of better mental health, inclusivity, and humanity within the legal field, Leena founded YLaw in 2013 and built the firm around progressive values. She introduced groundbreaking initiatives such as four day work weeks, pay transparency, and First Trimester Leave, while creating meaningful opportunities for women lawyers with children and people of colour.
In 2024, Leena further advanced access to justice by self-funding and developing a first-of-its-kind application designed to assist self-represented individuals. The platform provides separating couples with legal insights and free calculations related to their marital rights, helping bridge critical gaps in the legal system.
Her leadership has earned her numerous accolades, including being named one of Canada’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers, one of the Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada, and one of Business in Vancouver’s Top 40 Under 40. Under her direction, YLaw has also been recognized by The Globe and Mail as one of Canada’s Top 400 Fastest Growing Companies for three consecutive years.
A sought-after speaker and mentor, Leena regularly shares her insights and experiences to help reshape workplace culture and inspire the next generation of legal professionals.
Paul K. O’Donoghue – Executive Chairman, Co-Founder & Shareholder, Showpass & Credivera
Paul has over 30 years of corporate finance experience within the energy sector and, for the last 10 years, the Calgary technology sector. His experience includes corporate development, debt and equity financings, acquisitions and divestitures, investor relations, risk management, marketing, and legal affairs. He has participated in raising over $3 billion in capital and more than $2 billion in M&A transactions, while also helping start and lead several private ventures.
More recently, Paul has played a leading role in founding, structuring, and developing several Calgary technology companies including:
Showpass | Executive Chairman, Co Founder & Shareholder Showpass is an event management and ticketing company employing approximately 100 people and is the largest independent ticketing company in North America. Paul is responsible for capital funding and corporate governance.
Credivera | Executive Chairman, Co Founder & Shareholder Credivera provides verifiable digital credentials connecting employers, issuers, and workforce. Paul is responsible for capital funding and corporate governance.
PK Sound | Director & Shareholder
PK Sound builds world class concert speakers, combining advanced mechanical design, intelligent electronics, and next generation software.
Intergen Connect and Platform Calgary | Advisory Group Member Paul holds an MBA in Finance from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Oklahoma University.
Behind three decades of success are a few stories you won’t find in his bio, but you’ll hear them live at Fuckup Nights.
F*uckUp YYC - The Crew Behind the Chaos
Hosts: Shahr Savizi & Amanda Ovaici
The FuckUp Nights YYC team is a collective of community builders and catalysts dedicated to tearing down the facade of "perfect" professionalism. Led by Shahr Savizi and Amanda Ovaici, the pair are on a mission to destigmatize professional failure through radical vulnerability and the power of raw storytelling.
By hosting high-impact events that celebrate the messy, human side of business setbacks, Shahr, Amanda, and their team foster a resilient entrepreneurial ecosystem in Calgary. Their work encourages local leaders to:
Embrace Transparency: Shedding the "hustle culture" mask for honest, authentic growth.
Drive Resilience: Learning more from a collapse than a win to build stronger ventures.
Foster Meaningful Connections: Creating a professional landscape rooted in shared experience and grit.
In a world obsessed with highlight reels, the team is here to remind us that our biggest blunders are often our greatest lessons. They aren't just hosting an event; they’re building a culture where Calgary’s leaders can fail forward, together.
