After a long hiatus, I am back to blogging. It has been a good break. Why I took the break is for another blog post. I just returned from a good trip to India, visiting family and friends in Chennai, it was wonderful. A lot happened since I last blogged, bear with me while I unpack that in a series of post in the coming weeks. Although I have not blogged, thankfully I have not stopped taxing my brain cells or responding to people trying to engage with me.

There is so much to write about I thought maybe I will start with Startup Iceland 2018. I have been getting a lot of inquiry about the next event, the date, the theme, the speakers and request by people to be speakers.  It is wonderful to see that Startup Iceland has become more than what I originally envisioned. I guess that is nature of the universe. You throw yourself into something that is the good of the community and it compounds and returns back your effort in multiples. I am thankful for all the positive feedback and the response. There have been a number of people who have been instrumental in the development of Startup Iceland. We assembled and had our first kick off meeting to discuss what, how and who of the next event. The feedback from the core of the Startup Iceland patrons, volunteers and stakeholders is that they would like to go back to basics. The “origin” if you like of why we ventured to do this event in 2012. The speakers, the topics and the discussions were so fresh that it was inspiring and really kick started a lot of founders and entrepreneurs including myself. We want to get back to that.

We are also sending out a survey to the past attendees in the coming week to get their feedback and input. The speakers list is a work in progress, we have some speakers confirmed. We will update the website and announce the speakers again in the coming weeks. The date is May 31st, 2018, please mark your calendars and buy your early bird tickets now! Startup Iceland has always been about building a community to help founders and entrepreneurs bring their vision to life, so what does that mean in practical terms? I guess there are a number of books written about the start but every individual entrepreneur’s journey is unique and different, but we all can build mental models based on some best practices, that is what I mean when I refer to the basics. Given I have invested, mentored and worked with founders from the idea stage to all way to exit multiple times, I say this with no doubt in my mind, basics and foundations are crucial. We are going to go back to that in the coming event. We will tease out the best practices and models that the successful investors, entrepreneurs and founders who are coming to this year’s event have followed during the conference.

I am big fan of John Wooden the legendary basketball coach from UCLA, here is a great TED talk by John Wooden on the difference between winning and succeeding. The featured image of this blog post is the Pyramid of Success developed by the Coach, I think it clearly articulates the foundation of what it takes to build anything. This is a mental model, each of the block means something, click on each of them and spend some time to understand what it means to you and what you are building. If you can model your behavior based on these foundations you will definitely succeed but you need to have faith and patience. It takes time to do anything worthwhile. Startup Iceland is testament to that, 2018 is the 7th year we are doing this event, it has been a struggle every year but I never stopped believing that it will be something positive for all founders and especially to the Startup Community in Iceland.

PyramidThinkingSuccess

 

If you are a founder or an entrepreneur you need to tease those basics out of the speakers and mentors who are coming this year in the Startup Iceland’s unique one-on-one-first-come-first-served mentoring sessions. Remember you need to have a ticket to schedule a 20 minute session with any or all of the investors, influencers, mentors and founders who are participating in this year’s event. If you have any thoughts, suggestions or feedback please write to me.