Winning Gets You Started. Losing Is What Makes You Great.

Insights from the Scaling Business Summit 2026, Ho Chi Minh City.

The numbers came first. Four European Championship titles. Three Olympic Games. Two World Cups. Then Ariane Hingst, Football Legend and Co-Founder at FC Viktoria Berlin, smiled and said: the numbers are not the story.

Moderated by Shehryar Ali Shah, Senior Country Officer and Head of Office at IFC - International Finance Corporation, this fireside talk moved from the pitch in 1996 to a startup boardroom in Berlin. What connected every chapter was the same thread: the mindset that turns setbacks into fuel.

What the room heard was not a highlight reel. It was a framework built over thirty years of training in minus-ten-degree winters, losing World Cups, and co-founding a women's football club from scratch. Here is what the most competitive people do differently.

1. Know Exactly What You Are Hungry For

Ariane did not set out to be a champion. She set out to play football. The goal was specific and visceral not 'be successful' but 'put on the German jersey and win.' The first time she did, in the 1996 Euros at age 17, something clicked.

“That taste of success. That is so sweet. And it's one thing to win once, but I wanted more. I wanted to repeat it.”

The hunger was not abstract ambition. It was the memory of lifting a trophy and the refusal to let that be the only time.

At the 1999 World Cup, Germany lost to the United States in the quarterfinals. Ariane walked off the pitch knowing something was wrong. Not that the opponent was better, but that she had not given everything. “The worst part of losing is if you didn't give your best. There was something missing. And that was my little mindset because I didn't believe we could win.” Four years later, before the 2003 semi-final against the same opponent, the shift was deliberate. She entered the game decided. Germany won the tournament.

The difference between 1999 and 2003 was not fitness or tactics. It was the clarity and weight of the goal.

Lesson 1: Vague ambition produces vague results. The champions who sustain performance know precisely what they are chasing and can feel what it costs to fall short.

2. Fehlerkultur: Build a Culture That Learns From Mistakes

German has a word for it: Fehlerkultur - the culture of mistakes.

Ariane invoked it without apology. “We all understand that we will make mistakes and that is totally fine. These are the moments that we learn the most.”

Her method after every match was simple and consistent. Under the shower, on the way home, she would replay the game. What was good? What was not? What could have been better? “Most of the time you're more harsh to yourself. But I always wanted to analyze what you can do better.” The discipline was not self-punishment. It was self-improvement with a repeatable process.

She made the same argument for business: “Those who have the most success, they've failed before. Very often it's the second or third company. The biggest mistake you can do is not to try.” Failure is not the opposite of progress. It is the evidence of an attempt and the raw material for the next one.

The one failure she could not accept was not giving her best. Losing to a better opponent is honorable. Losing while holding something back is not. That distinction drove every training session in between.

Lesson 2: Embed a structured review process not to assign blame, but to extract the one thing that can be done better next time. That discipline, repeated, compounds.

3. Think Outside the Box Then Actually Do It

FC Viktoria Berlin was not built on a business plan. It was built on a tweet. When Angel City FC announced their launch in Los Angeles, two of Ariane's future co-founders saw it and said: we need the same in Berlin. Six women, an entrepreneur, marketers, a football legend came together with one thing in common: they loved the game and wanted to build something for female empowerment.

What they built looked different from the start. In their first season in the third division, a co-founder proposed live-streaming a match. Ariane, the footballer, said no, it would not look good on TV. “Thank God they didn't listen to me.” Instead of broadcasting a game, they built an entertainment event around it: investors, politicians, sports stars as co-commentators, sharing why they believed in Victoria Berlin. The TV station was surprised by the viewership numbers.

“That describes the whole approach we have. We are thinking outside the box. We do things differently.” They made player health insurance non-negotiable, even when it meant a significant budget increase. They built a mentorship program pairing investors with players. Sponsors like Scalable Capital who had never considered sports partnerships came in because Victoria Berlin was not just a football club. It was a platform for reaching women who invest.

The structural insight: in women's football, the old model waiting for funding from the men's game is not a model. It is a dependency. Victoria Berlin chose to build income from scratch: community, merchandise, storytelling, sponsors who share the mission.

Lesson 3: Constraints force creativity. When you cannot use the existing playbook, you have to write a better one. That advantage compounds if you move before others do.

4. Use Technology to Buy Back Time

Ariane was direct about where technology adds real value in sport: it does not replace judgment. It removes the work that prevents judgment from happening.

GPS trackers generate real-time data on player load, acceleration, and intensity during training. The coaching team sets the target for each session. The sports analyst reads the output and flags who needs rest and who can push more. The decision still belongs to the coach but it is now grounded in data rather than observation alone.

The shift in video analysis is even sharper. When Ariane was coaching, she would manually tag every clip from a full match, cutting, labeling, sequencing. Now the system delivers edited clips automatically. “That saves me so much more time to actually spend with the player to talk about what she can do better.” The technology did not replace the conversation. It created the conditions for it.

“I think that's what AI is mostly there for optimize your time.”

The frame she offered was clean: smart tech does the processing so the human can do the work that only humans can do, building trust, reading context, making judgment calls under pressure.

Lesson 4: Audit where your team's time goes before selecting a tool. The right technology removes processing friction so your people can spend more time on decisions that actually require them.

5. You Cannot Win Alone. Build Your Support System

The question from the audience was: how do you get back up when you're down? Ariane's answer was not about grit or self-talk. It was about structure.

“You're not alone and you can never ever do it alone. As a football player, you have teammates, coaches, a physiotherapist. As an entrepreneur, you have a co-founder, team members, or someone outside the bubble, your family, your friends.” The support system is not a nice-to-have. It is how sustained performance is possible.

She was equally direct about self-belief, addressing the women in the room who second-guess whether they belong.

“If you're a woman, you're not in this position by chance. There is no way some man came and put you in this position just to make you a gift. You already fought so much more than a man would ever have to. So believe in that.”

The practical advice: find one person who gives you honest feedback, not just encouragement, not just criticism. Someone who tells you the truth and helps you see what to do next. Build self-confidence by stepping outside your comfort zone, failing, and noticing that you survived and grew.

Lesson 5: High performance is not a solo project. Build the support structure deliberately within your team, your co-founders, and your personal network. Then be part of someone else's structure too.

The CEO Execution Playbook: What to Do Tomorrow

1. 1. Name the goal precisely. Write down not just what you want to achieve this year, but what it will feel like when you get there. Share it with your team in those terms. Ambiguity in the goal produces ambiguity in the effort.
2. 2. Build a Fehlerkultur review. After your next major project or pitch, run a structured debrief: what worked, what did not, what one thing would you do differently. Make it a recurring practice, not a post-mortem.
3. 3. Challenge one assumption in your business model this week. Identify the thing your team has agreed is impossible or not worth trying. Ask: what would we build if that constraint did not exist?
4. 4. Audit where your team's time goes. Find one processing task that takes more than two hours per week and ask whether a tool exists to automate it. Reinvest that time into direct team development or strategic decisions.
5. 5. Map your support system. Write down the three people you call when things are going badly. If the list is empty or unclear, that is the first thing to fix before the next hard moment arrives.

→ Watch the full session on YouTube