English: Jim Collins (James C. Collins), an Am...

English: Jim Collins (James C. Collins), an American business consultant, author of “Built to Last” and “Good to Great”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Brad Feld interviewing Jim Collins, two of my favorite business thought leaders and authors talking about a topic that I extremely engaged in and interested in developing in Iceland. I was pretty bummed that I could not make it for the Startup Phenomena Event in Boulder, Colorado. There are a number of pearls of wisdom in this discussion. The most important of which is the concept of doing big things, focusing on the who and the role of luck or chance. I believe that in order to build an antifragile or lasting startup community it has to be a long term thinking which makes sense because doing things like this well… takes a long time. I believe the startup community in Iceland is starting to hum, the biggest lead indicator of this is when a young software engineer who came to me and wanted to work at GreenQloud, he was brilliant, talented and with a lot of energy so I was only thrilled to get him to join our team. 3 months in he wanted to quit and I was baffled because he loved the culture and environment that we are creating in GreenQloud, really liked the people he worked with and was really on board with the Mission of GreenQloud… when I asked him what has changed, he told me that he and his friends are doing a startup and they wanted to go out on their own and do that. I knew then and there the vision I had for Iceland is starting to take shape.

When really smart people are willing to risk their jobs, careers and possibly a lot of their time to build a company we have the right ingredients to building an antifragile startup community. What is really missing is the Big Hairy Audacious Goals that Jim Collins referred to in the talk. I have some ideas up my sleeve, GreenQloud is one of those big ideas. If you have not been following what we are doing with GreenQloud, you should really look at it. I believe GreenQloud could be a bigger company than any company built out of Iceland and I am not saying it because I am the CEO. GreenQloud is in the business of changing the world and it takes time, effort and passionate people. We are on that journey and starting to really accelerate our execution. I also have a couple of projects that I am really excited about launching, you will hear about it in the near future. We are currently kicking off the preparation for Startup Iceland 2014.

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