Islandsbanki wants you to apply for the grant
It is great to see many options for startups and entrepreneurs in Iceland to get Seed funding to get started with their idea or even a small amount of money to move them forward. Islandsbanki has increased their Entrepreneurs Fund to ISK 10.000.000 ($85,000) which is granted as an endowment i.e a grant. Islandsbanki focuses on Sustainable Fishing and Renewable Energy as their core industry focus and allocate funds to startups and entrepreneurs who are solving problems in those sectors. You can apply for it here (it is in Icelandic, but it should be simple enough to translate with Google Translate). The gist of it is that the company or idea needs to be in the Sustainable Fishing and/or Renewable Energy fields, passionate about the vision and the chutzpah to get stuff done. There are a number of requirements like financial plan, annual statement etc if you don’t have any of that it is fine, focus on the problem/pain, your vision and why do you believe you or your team is the right one to solve it.
I think these kinds of funds help entrepreneurs to clarify their thinking and also focus on the important things to communicate their idea and also more importantly gives some seed money to get started. I am glad to see these broad initiatives starting to come back to life in Iceland since 2008. Any initiative to help startups and founders and entrepreneurs is a good thing IMHO. I believe these two sectors have a lot of challenges and building companies or startups that solve those problems are going to be valuable.
If you have a good understanding of the problem or the business domain and don’t know how to get started, you can join us this thursday at Cafe Solon at 5:30pm to learn about the local chapter of Founders Institute.
We also shared
the initiative to participate in the program that Sam Altman of Y Combinator is doing in Stanford University. It is a class as part of the Y Combinator’s Startup School, it is a class that they are globally making available, it was fascinating to see more than 6000 people joined the Facebook Group for the How to Start a Startup class, I have volunteered to host the viewing of the classes in Iceland, we need to find a venue and location. If you are interested to help or have ideas for venue please let me know. We are trying to find out how many people want to participate.
