8th Startup Iceland was a blast. We streamed the event live and we had 20 times more viewers than we allow in the event. It shows that there is a need for genuine connection to founder’s journey. The highlight in Iceland was Skuli Mogensen, the founder of Wow Air. Skuli was brave, authentic and spoke from his heart and shared the lessons learnt. I am so very proud of Skuli and all the founders who came and shared their stories. Founders change the world I am happy to call this group my tribe. If you are a founder and want to connect to your community, Startup Iceland is a good place.
You can watch Skuli’s talk here
Gunnar Jonatanson took great pictures of the event, the mentoring sessions and also the AWS workshop. You can see event Gallery here and the mentoring session Gallery here.
I announced to the audience that I intend to do Startup Iceland for 2 more years that would fulfill the commitment that I made in 2011 to organize Startup Iceland for 10 years. I have given it 2 years because transition takes time. I want to write down the philosophy of Startup Iceland and also the values that I want the person who takes over to embody. A Constitution document if you will. I want the team or the one who will take over for the right reasons. This person has to be an entrepreneur or startup founder, there is a distinction. They should embody empathy for the founder and the founding journey. They should be open to invite others to do things to empower the startup community. Has to subordinate the ego and be a servant leader. Yes, there are a lot of hard things that this role requires and it has almost no economic gain! If you know someone who remotely embodies the above things, send them my way. I have had a couple of people who have reached out to me and I want to put them to test to see if they survive, because this is really hard to do.
