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.

Who needs another Silicon Valley?

Gunnar Holmstein, the Colorful CEO of Clara comes up with interesting perspectives. He has a question about if startup ecosystems should do what Eric Ries talks about in his book The Lean Startup. Rather than trying to build a "Silicon Valley" clone in every city and country, should we be asking How can we build Sustainable Entrepreneurial Ecosystems the same way we build a company.  The challenges are the same, and we face tremendous uncertainty in both situations. Can we build better Entrepreneurial Ecosystem by asking the question how do we know it is sustainable? how do we know what we are building is wanted by the market? What should be the metrics that we should measure, so that we can apply the Build - Measure - Learn iterative cycle to even Entrepreneurial Ecosystem building. I think we have a very interesting question to ask our guests and participants for the Conference in Iceland in May. How do we Build a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. Have you signed up yet? if not you can @ http://signup.startupiceland.com.

Chris Schultz was fortunate to hear Brad Feld talk about his 5 components of a sustainable startup ecosystem and he has written about it here, and more recently Brad linked his post on Startup communities to a talk given by David Cohen in San Diego and David has 7 things that need to be there for Startup ecosystems to flourish. Is it possible for us to measure these 5 or 7 things? Can we build-measure-learn these things? I certainly believe so. I am going to list them here and see how we can measure each:

1. Long View – a 20 year timeline – stakeholders must be committed to the community for long term. Can this be measured? even if we could what would be the purpose of measuring this?
2. Entrepreneurial leadership - It has to be lead by Entrepreneurs, cannot be led by governments, non-profits, big companies, VCs, lawyers, accountants, economic development, universities.  All of those stakeholders need to be engaged, but entrepreneurs must drive it. This can be measured? basically who is running the show when it comes to Entrepreneurial ecosystem.
3. Fresh Meat - Need new talent all the time, college graduates and people should move in and out. This is easy to measure, the number of new graduates coming out the universities and maybe a cross mash up between the Design/Creative group and the Technical/Engineering group. A Ratio of Creative/Analytical graduates
4. Engaging Activities – engage the entrepreneurial community from top to bottom – startup to serial entrepreneurs – get all involved – you need a thing that engages all those people. You want really active engagement for a moderate period of time because its impossible to maintain a high level activity by someone on something that is not core focus. This can be measured as well, the example given is the TechStars program and other incubator programs in Boulder Colorado.
5. Repeat – must have a rhythm with for a long time.  Must have a beat that last through economic cycles. The only way to build a community is to move beyond boom and bust and build something over extended periods of time. This again is not relevant to measure, but it should be interesting to see continuity.

So what do you think? do we have the necessary ingredients to create an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem here in Iceland?

What does it take to be a great Mentor

Mentoring is by far the most rewarding and challenging role anyone can take on. It is much like parenting, but in a mentoring relationship there is no hierarchy. It is mainly give from both sides. David Cohen had a fantastic post a while back about the Mentor Manifesto. David is the CEO of TechStars, Boulder and has had the experience to work with hundreds of mentors and entrepreneurs. I could not agree more to the post. We have a challenge in Iceland, there are very few experienced, committed mentors. Whenever, I bring up the topic of mentoring, that question is always followed with What does the mentor get back for their time and effort? The whole point of mentoring is NOT TO EXPECT ANYTHING BACK! it is about giving, like unconditional love to your child. It is a service one does to pay forward. Why is it so hard to grasp?
When I joined Ernst & Young in their Management Consulting practice a long time ago, the first thing I was introduced to was my Mentor who was different to my Counselor. What a fantastic concept. The organization had made it a institutional practice to make sure everyone who joins the team has a mentor and a counselor. Mentor guides the new team member on the workings of the organization and helps in any challenge the new team member encounters. A mentor to me was a friend, a buddy actually that is what EY called it. a "Buddy" is usually there for you to talk about anything related to work. Some of buddies become full fledged mentors and helped me shape my career at EY. I have played the role of a mentor to many of my friends and I take the role of mentoring very seriously.

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