I believe anyone can learn the art of building great companies, everyone, I mean every single startup founder starting from Steve Jobs to Larry Page to Mark Zuckerberg was a noob on the first day they decided to take that journey. Entrepreneurship and creating companies is hard, but that does not mean you need to make the same mistakes everyone else did on their journey. I was searching for a practical and structured approach to creating great technical founders and accidentally bumped into Founders Institute and when I read more about it, I got intrigued and took the test and decided that we need to start this in Iceland. I wrote about it here, we had a couple of meetups trying to recruit founders to take the plunge. I have to say the response was rather tepid. We did not get in front of the target audience, who according to the Founders Institute data, are people who have a day job but have been thinking about founding their own company. Our ambition did not align with the market approach and we fell flat on our face. Mea culpa.
So, yesterday we had our hand-off from the Founders Institute leadership team to take another shot at this. We are once again going to try to launch Founders Institute Reykjavik Chapter. We will be organizing a couple of meetups to talk about why this is important and how Founders Institute can help. I have been a founder myself although I have not created any tech company, I have been part of a number of technology companies that have been created. I have seen the path and I sincerely believe with the right kind of mentoring, coaching and approach, great technology companies can be created anywhere. The secret sauce in this are the Founders and I am on a mission to create great founders. The maxim goes like this Great Founders create Great Teams, Great Teams create Great Products, Great Products result in Great Companies. Thats the way of the Force.
If you are in a job, maybe it is a great job or a dead end one, and if you have been thinking about creating a great product I would highly encourage you to reach out to me. Founders Institute is one path, I know there are several paths in this journey, but this has elements that creates a sense of community, connects you to real founders who have walked this path, ensures you have skin in the game, enable peer validation of your approach and does not expect you to quit your day job until you are absolutely sure that is the way to go. Are you ready for the ride of your life?
