Haukur Gudjonsson has done a great review of the Startup Kids – A documentary about the startup life, it is in Icelandic.
I met with the founders of The Startup Kids Sesselja Vilhjalmsdottir and Vala Halldorsdottir, about a year back when they had just finished filming the documentary and were on the way to edit, amend and smoothen the rough edges of the film. I was very impressed with their spunk, here we have 2 girls, who decided to brave everything i.e apply for a EU grant, apply to Kickstarter, raise money to go do a documentary about Entrepreneurship and Startups. Actually, it is even more adventurous than that, they bought a one-way ticket to the US and made contacts and met all the new movers and shakers of Silicon Valley by hustling. The attribute that I wish every one should aspire to have, you want something you just work hard for it and go make it happen. There is no better way to define Entrepreneurship. The movie was professional, very inspiring, touched on all the cliches and the human side of being an entrepreneur, young kids raising millions of dollars in Venture Money, some loosing it all, others saying why they do what they do. The common theme through out the documentary is the passion they all hold onto to make their ideas come to life. It is not always about the ideas it is the people behind the ideas that matter. I have written a lot about teams here, here and here. I want to license this movie and make it a theme for Startup Iceland, because it touches on all the things that I have been writing about and saying since I started on this journey. In addition to that, I am committing to support Sessilja and Vala in anything that they want to do just like Ron Conway and Yuri Milner did with Y-Combinator, ‘cos I know they will figure it out and make it work… here is a trailer of the movie, “No one starts a band anymore, they all want to start a company…” Awesome start!
This is why I am betting on Iceland, despite all the people thinking what I am doing is crazy (I started investing in Iceland right after the collapse in 2009, yes, everyone said that I needed to go and check myself for insanity). I know there are more Sessiljas and Valas in Iceland just like there are more Gunnar Holmsteins and Jon Edvalds, the CEO and CTO of Clara. My passion is in finding these teams, mentoring them and creating value, I am a VC – Value Creator :). I attended Seed Forum where one of the speaker was Truls Berg, a 3 time entrepreneur and one of the leaders in establishing an Angel Investor Network in Norway, defined VC this way. I will do a follow up post about Seed Forum, the pitches and what is not working for me with these pitches.