Why Some Countries Succeed

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

I read this post in New York Times with the title "Why Some Countries Go Bust" and I just finished watching Shawn Achor talk about how we focus so much of our efforts on describing the negative things and topics. I was wondering why did the author not make the title in the New York Times article to focus on the positive aspects of the research work done by the Economist Daron Acemoglu. It is so strange, it is a simple switch in how you look at the world and you pretty much communicate the same story but the reader walks away thinking hey, we should do these things in our country rather than thinking, how we are starting to see America go to dogs or for that matter any country. I guess that is why I would never be a journalist, I want to focus on the positive aspects of any challenge in front of us, it gives me the energy to tackle it and if it is something that is beyond my circle of influence then I try very hard to just smile and move on. I am not saying I am great at it but I am trying very hard to make a habit of it. So coming back to the article, the research work done by Daron categorically outlines why certain elements drive a country to prosperity and some others to poverty. Daron and his collaborator James Robinson, argue that the wealth of a country is most closely correlated with the degree to which the average person shares in the overall growth of its economy. The authors go on to outline that when a nation’s institutions prevent the poor from profiting from their work, no amount of disease eradication, good economic advice or foreign aid seems to help. I wonder how is the current situation is Iceland? Are the institutions preventing people from profiting from their work? I don't know and I am not trying to be political. The reason it is important is that the legal operational framework in an economy needs to be fair. What do I mean by Fair? well, anyone with the product or service should be free to profit from it, there it is I have said it. Profit. Why is this such a bad thing? I believe greater the value from your product or service greater should be you profit potential.

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Starting Up Iceland

[Original Post written @http://startupiceland.wordpress.com]
I have been frantically meeting and organizing the Startup Iceland Conference, here is the Facebook Event Page. While we are organizing this, the constant question that I get is will we be able to fund this conference can we raise the money needed to hold the conference. I am totally transparent about how I am trying to organize this. The cost of putting up this conference is quite a bit but many of the sponsors have stepped up, namely Arion Bank, Icelandair, Kosmos and Kaos, Reykjavik University and the US Embassy in Iceland. If we can pull this off it is going to be the start of something awesome, but as I promised before if we crash and burn it is going to be totally out in the open for everyone to see :) The website design has come out really nice, I am hoping that we can finish all the fine touches and launch it in the next couple of days. I have a talented team who are a startup in their own right, who have stepped up to sponsor the website... how cool is that? A Startup Sponsoring the Starting up of Iceland. I digress, but we have our major sponsor also committed to sponsoring Eric Ries to participate in the conference. I have sent the agreement to Eric's Agent lets keep our fingers crossed and hope he agrees to come. I already have an awesome speaker list lined up:
His Excellency Olafur Ragnar Grimsson - The President of Iceland
Brad Feld - Partner Foundry Group
Brad Burnham - Partner Union Square Ventures
Rebeca Hwang - CEO youNoodle.com
Hilmar Veigar Petursson - CEO CCP Games
Hilmar B. Janusson - EVP of R&D Ossur
The Computer Science Department in Reykjavik University has agreed to host the Hackathon, the Recktor of Reykjavik University has been awesome and totally wants to support the effort. So far, I have been very excited about the developments and I think we are well on the way... but we need more people to participate to make this an awesome event so please share the links to signup with your network and Lets Do This! My vision is to make Startup Iceland like Iceland Airwaves, in the first quarter of the year. A yearly event that is focused on Startups, Entrepreneurship and Starting New... hey! it is Spring after all! although it does not seem like it when I look out of the window.

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Innovation Clusters - Why they don't work

Here is an interesting article about "How to make a region innovative"  by Strategy+Business portal of Booz & Company. Why am I writing about this? well, because there is all this talk about Innovation Clusters in Iceland around Geothermal Energy, Seafood etc In My Humble Opinion (IMHO), it is a waste of time! this is old school thinking that never works. Don't take my word for it go and read the article. I am not the only one who thinks this way, there is a need for new thinking on innovation and entrepreneurship all around the world so how does not go about creating this new value i.e new equity. We are here because over indulgence in Debt has basically eaten away all the equity in the world. I am sure we all can agree that is the case in Iceland, but more and more countries are starting to feel the pain of this... hello! have you seen the news about Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal... and the USA? So, here is a thought start hyper growth companies that can innovate at the speed of the internet and it can be done only by small teams because of chemistry, mechanics, change management etc. There is enough evidence to support Bigger a company gets the smaller is their rate of innovation, I am sure there are exceptions to this, but the majority of large companies fall into What Clay Christensen calls the Innovators Dilemma. If you have not read the book I highly recommend it. The only way to innovate out of crisis is to start small, start at the grass root and change the entire paradigm of thinking and radically make traditional businesses obsolete. There is only one sector that is good at this at the the Startup Nation! Actually I would go one step further and say... you better be thinking about a Startup Of You, no wait Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn just wrote a book with that title. People these days, always stealing ideas :) just kidding. Go and read that book it is fascinating to think about the fundamental changes that are happening right in front of our eyes, but you need to be aware to see or suddenly you become obsolete. Are you getting obsolete?

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Skolapulsinn.is - Mashing Technology, Education and Psychology

Brian Suda, does not need any introduction in the Icelandic Startup Scene. He also writes a pretty well read blog @optional.is. I stumbled upon this post by Brian on Skolapulsinn.is which he and a couple of other hackers put together for solving a big problem in Schools, to gauge the pulse of the students. Typically this is captured by asking the students through Surveys, but Skolapulsinn.is makes that feedback look much shorter and allows for School Administrator and Teachers to react in real time on what is going in the school system. He has written a very detailed post on this in his blog here. I have to be honest I was not aware that this tool was hacked together in 2008 and has surveyed more than 12000 students, thats pretty impressive data set. I need to talk to Brian today and understand where is this data and what can we learn from it.  I bet you could ask a whole lot of questions and this data can be used to understand the living breathing student community in Iceland in real time. I like how Brain refers to the school system as a living breathing thing rather than a stoic institution. We could ask important questions like how involved are the parents in the school work of the students, because time and time again it has been proven that kids whose parents are more involved with their kids work, make better students. We can actually give a more real-time report card rather than wait for the year to be over or solicit the opinion of the teacher. It is the kid who knows whether their  parents are involved in the home work or not. In addition, we could ask questions about the general feeling of the students to access whether they are feeling positive about school, their self confidence etc. This tools is a fascinating introduction to me and I obviously am going to bug Brian about how this is used in the Icelandic School System. If it is not used, then I want to lobby to the Ministry of Education and get them to use it. We need innovation like this to Tinker and Learn to improve our educational system, after all is'nt Education about Learning?

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3 Great Global Challenges

I have been a fan of Thomas L. Friedman since I started reading the New York Times and then his books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World is Flat, Hot, Flat and Crowded etc He has a knack to say the things that matter in the simplest of words and gets your brain working. His latest opinion with title "We Need a Second Party" is a classic. Although the message of the article is geared towards the Republican Presidential Candidate run-off, the take away for the rest of us is the challenges that he outlines. These challenges are not America's challenges these are Global challenges, every country, every citizen needs to be thinking about how they are being impacted by these challenges. No longer can we be complacent about our job, or position or title or education thinking that is going to save your future. The challenges are here and you better have a strategy to tackle them. Let me outline what those are:

"The first is responding to the challenges and opportunities of an era in which globalization and the information technology revolution have dramatically intensified, creating a hyperconnected world. This is a world in which education, innovation and talent will be rewarded more than ever. This is a world in which there will be no more “developed” and “developing countries,” but only HIEs (high-imagination-enabling countries) and LIEs (low-imagination-enabling countries)"


Wow! could he be more direct? where do you think Iceland ranks in this HIE vs LIE world? are we really making Iceland ready for the onslaught? believe me the competition is coming whether you like it or not, a billion people in India and China are raring to go, they are more motivated, they work harder and they want to win so badly that their lives depends on it. How can Iceland compete with that?


"The second of our great long-term challenges are our huge debt and entitlement obligations. They can’t be fixed without raising and reforming taxes and trimming entitlements and defense. We absolutely cannot just cut entitlements and defense. That would imperil the personal security and national security of every American. We must also reform taxes to raise more revenues."


I cannot emphasize enough the problem of entitlement, this is an epidemic and it is cancerous. There is only one way to solve this problem, arm every citizen with the tools to create their own wealth and their own future then they stop asking where's my beef. Entrepreneurs and sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems enable that, are we creating a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem here in Iceland? I will follow up with the post on the Icelandic entitlement cost and I have written about the perception challenges in Iceland and Icelandic Governmental Resource Allocation problem. Of course Iceland does not have the problem of a huge defense spending but we have the challenge of very high levels of public debt. That in itself can suck the entire country and the standard living down.


"Our third great challenge is how we power our future — without dangerously polluting and warming the earth — as the global population grows from 7 billion to 9 billion people by 2050, and more and more of them want to drive, eat and live like Americans. Two billion more people who want to live like us? We can’t drill our way out of that challenge, which is why energy efficiency and clean power will be the next great global industry. Real conservatives — like Richard Nixon, the father of the Environmental Protection Agency, and George H.W. Bush, the author of the first cap-and-trade deal to curb acid rain — believe in conserving. The current Republican candidates are so captured by the oil and coal lobbies that they can’t think seriously about this huge opportunity for energy innovation."


Here Iceland has a clear lead, because Iceland is endowed with the gift of natural energy. We need to take the lead on policies that enhance this rather than build walls and stop progress. I am not saying not to take the Environment into consideration, there has to be a balance and we can make policies that enable investments in the Renewable Energy field that does not hamper the environment and leaves it in a better shape than when we found it. It can be done.


What do you think?

The Wealth Gap

Image via Wikipedia

BBC has been doing a documentary on the widening Wealth Gap in the world, I have a problem with the portrayal of the issue. I am not wealthy, far from it so I am not arguing for the sake of taking the opposite opinion, but I just think documentaries need to be unbiased. I had referred to Daniel Kahneman's new book Thinking, Fast and Slow. If you have not yet read it I would highly encourage you to get that book into your reading list. He addresses this issue, he says there is a huge difference in income between people because some people care more about having a high income vs those who do not. I am not saying it is a good thing, what is bad is lack of opportunities for those who want to climb the ladder of wealth, if for whatever reason that does not manifest itself then we have social unrest. I believe the opportunities are always there, all the post that I have written about entrepreneurs is geared towards that, I fundamentally believe everybody can do anything they set their mind to. Your focus determines your reality, if we focus on all the unfairness in the world then we feel miserable and depressed, however if one looks at all the opportunities that exist and all the problems that still need to be solved, then one gets a sense of purpose. I have discovered my purpose, I want to empower entrepreneurs to achieve their highest goals. Been doing that in whatever way I can. So if you are an entrepreneur or want to be one, contact me. I am always available to meet entrepreneurs.

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Vision without execution is Hallucination

Image via Wikipedia

Thomas Edison said that and I just finished reading Steve Case's opinion piece on Washington Post, where he refers to that as well. The title of the opinion piece is "Give entrepreneurs room and they will grow the economy". What is interesting in Steve's note is that he alludes to how America is loosing its competitive edge in Entrepreneurship and what they are doing about it. A number of bills are being proposed in Congress to support Entrepreneurs, including allowing for Crowd Funding... can this concept work here in Iceland? What is being done in the Parliament to support Entrepreneurs in Iceland? I have the advantage of not being worried about what is discussed in the Parliament because if it was important and affects me, I will hear about it. Never the less, it begs the question. How can Iceland be more competitive in this space? If America the quintessential country for Entrepreneurs is worried about its leadership what should countries in Europe do? What do you think?

Here is what I think needs to be done, first things first, we need to get visibility to the Entrepreneurship community here in Iceland and we need to learn from those who have done this successfully before. It is not enough if we meet amongst ourselves and talk about family politics. We need to invite people who are not part of the system. I have been talking to a bunch of people about organizing a conference and to get my own validated learning I have a sign up page http://signup.startupiceland.com. My goal is to get 500 to 1000 signups then I know we can host a conference and bring prominent investors, entrepreneurs and thinkers in this space so we can learn from them. Couple of ideas on the table are to run a workshop on Lean Startup and Business Model Canvas, A Hack Day and a day of lectures and discussions. All those who have signed up, thank you. You should receive an email shortly requesting your input on a bunch of things. For those who have not signed up, please do and share it with your network, you never know there could be someone who has a job doing something they are not very interested to do but wants to try their hands on Entrepreneurship, it is a great way to start. Learn from the best and other entrepreneurs, find international mentors and networks and launch your dream.

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