SXSW update - 8th Lean Startup Meetup

[Original post written @http://startupiceland.wordpress.com]

Kristjan Freyr Kristjansson was at SXSW2012 and he gave a brief talk about the show and more importantly shared his thoughts on attending many of the Lean Startup Panel. The summary of the SXSW update was:

1. It is very noisy, crowded and advertisements everywhere - it would be impossible to get your startup noticed or even to meet someone and follow up on the conversation. It is a fantastic place to get connected for the first time through the parties hosted by various brands, Kristjan particularly liked the one hosted by Startup Weekend, TechStars and Google.
2. Have a plan with regard to what you want to achieve when you attend SXSW, and it is something every startup/entrepreneur should experience once
3. There is an opportunity to have a big Icelandic contingency in the next SXSW, as the planners of the SXSW really liked the Thojdfunder National Assembly that was organized in Iceland and they would like to tap into the crowd of brilliant entrepreneurs and people focused on solving challenging problems attending SXSW next year and apply the same approach that was applied in Iceland. Gudjon Mar and Gunnar Holmstein were the instigators. I fully support the initiative lets see if we can gather enough people in Iceland to support this initiative and show some strength from Iceland next year in SXSW.
4. There were some very exciting interactive advertisement focused software that had face recognition software and based on your online profile was able to display ads that were targeted. The technology is here and it is just a matter of time before it becomes mainstream. The advertisements on the subway in Minority Report when Tom Cruise was running is going to happen sooner than you think.
5. There were many formats for the Lean Startup sessions, some of them were led by Eric Ries, but there were others where different startups shared their examples of applying the Lean Startup Principles. Kristjan, thought it was so incredible to be see so many startups starting to apply the lessons and are learning fast and pivoting into valuable solutions. It is amazing to me why this has not caught on sooner here in Iceland, we have a long way to go here.

The general discussion centered around how we can experiment and validate hypothesis, Kristjan shared the link to the Lean Startup Experiment website lean.st. The 5 minute corner was taken by Helgi þor Jonsson, Helgi has been following a blog site Unicornfree.com and how he has taken the first step to becoming an entrepreneur. He has started working on a prototype of a Project Management Platform for volunteers and non-profit activities. His insight working with this blog site is the concept of 30 x 500, which is get $30 from 500 people then you have a business or $500 from 30 people. He has been taking the online course which is almost over and he would be ready to move on to the next stage of launching his product. We discussed a lot about how to raise the bar on Startups being created in Iceland. Of course there were many suggestions, Gudjon Mar was of the opinion that we need to have big wins to establish a precedence that successful and profitable startups can be created out of Iceland. I feel we need to go one step further, successful and profitable startups need to created in a faster pace. We need to accelerate the process to actually make an impact and change minds in Iceland. I believe that if we can focus the entire startup community to pick topics from Paul Graham's Ideas that YCombinator will invest in and basically build companies for those problems we will get somewhere with the culture here. We need to make it attractive for someone to invest in, nothing against someone wanting to start a coffee shop it just does not create a buzz for Angel and Venture Investors to get excited about.