Posts tagged ‘Arion Bank’

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March 22, 2013

Startup Reykjavik 2013

Image representing TechStars as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

I started on this journey to build a Startup Community in Iceland right after the Financial Collapse of 2008. What is needed when you need to create a lot of startups is an acceleration platform and I searched tirelessly for it and I bumped into TechStars and the first video I saw of TechStars I knew that is what we needed to have right here in Iceland. Here is that video:

StartupReykjavik-logo-portorateAnd then I started viewing all the videos in the Founders – Techstars – Boulder. I was so inspired 3 years back and I went and met with everyone that I could to get Techstars to Iceland. I was extremely pleased to see that dream come true when Arion Bank took the initiative to launch Startup Reykjavik, which is part of the Global Accelerator Network which is the network of accelerators that is part of the Techstars program. If you have not watched the videos, I really encourage you to check out the TechStars TV channel in YouTube. Go to the videos that were loaded 3 years back. I get really inspired even today when I watch those episodes. What is this got to do with Startup Reykjavik? well there is only 6 more days to apply for Startup Reykjavik. If you are stuck in a dead end job and really don’t enjoy what you do here is a fantastic opportunity to go build a business. It is also for those of us who have always been saying that one day we will be our own boss (actually that never happens because you are always reporting to someone, either your board or investment committee or whatever but thats not the point, its about taking ownership of your destiny).

The 2012 program was the first accelerator in Iceland and I was very happy to see to complete and as far as I know many of the companies are still in existence and trying to create  a business some have actually made more progress than others. It is a marathon and not a sprint, so I am looking forward to seeing some of these companies build a sustainable business in the future.

I volunteer as a Mentor in Startup Reykjavik and in every other Startup or Entrepreneurship related activity in Iceland because I have made that my life purpose. I want to help Entrepreneurs no Serve Entrepreneurs… I think that is a pretty good goal. Anyways enough about me. Have you applied yet? if you have been telling yourself you want to do something this is your chance like Nike says Just Do It.

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August 19, 2012

Startup Reykjavik 2012 – Done!

I was so pleased to see the participation of the investor community in the Investor Day of Startup Reykjavik 2012. It was a fantastic pitch day, all the teams did a great job… it showed how well they had prepared, their message was powerful and there was passion in their presentations. I am also biased because I was one of the mentors and supporter of the initiative, but that should not take anything away from the teams. The organizers Innovit, Klak and Arion Bank really were committed and it showed. I was very proud in the after party to see everyone enjoying themselves… the community came together. A couple of them were suggesting that I should be the first marathoner to run Reykjavik Marathon hung over! I passed on that fabulous and probably painful idea. Now that the program is done, the teams have been having meetings with the investor community. I am eager to see how the local investor community steps up to the challenge. It is quite interesting that I am reading Brad Feld‘s Startup Communities book right now and he categorizes the Investors community as Feeders in the Startup Ecosystem.

Source: Amazon.com Startup Communities

At the early stage, raising money is hard, figuring out which deals are good is hard, and everything else associated with getting a company up and running is hard, so what’s the big deal? Rather than struggle with this, investors should recognize that they are feeders into the startup community, play a long-term game, and work hard to help support the development of their startup communities.

So I am going to start lobbying with the investor community to take the plunge just like all the entrepreneurs did, write checks without expecting anything back and see how this turns out. I am confident that this will transform the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Iceland. We are starting to implement the strategies outlined in the book by Brad. We did Startup Iceland a conference focused on Entrepreneurship and Startups, I am committed to make this a yearly event. We have Startup Reykjavik, which is a mentorship driven accelerator program to build new companies. We also have regular Hackathons which was initiated in Startup Iceland and in October we will have Music HackDay. I have reached out to the Reykjavik University and they are very motivated to support more Hackathons. Another weekly event that I would like to initiate is Entrepreneurship Book Club, we discussed the Lean Startup book at the beginning of the year and I want to continue on that tradition to start another book discussion. I believe if we consistently do this with a long term vision in mind we will create an ecosystem that thrives on itself. It takes commitment, vision and participation from all the stakeholders. There are many strategies that I have listed here, each could be a blog post. I would encourage everyone interested in building an sustainable startup ecosystem in Iceland to read the book Startup Communities, as Brad covers the story of Startup Iceland and he was generous enough to allow me to write a couple of pages in the book. Here I leave you with the video of Startup Reykjavik Year 1.

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Posted in Accelerator, Entrepreneurship, Mentoring, Philosophy, Pitching, Startup Community, Strategy | 3 Comments »

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August 13, 2012

Startup Reykjavik – Investor Day

Today we have a guest post by Kristján Kristjánsson, one of the organizers of Startup Reykjavik and CEO of Innovit. I am going to the Investor day in Startup Reykjavik, if you know of an Angel investor in the Icelandic investor community, they should participate in the Investor Day or if you have been thinking about becoming an angel investor here is your chance to get into the deal flow, you should get a chance to meet with other angel and venture investors to build your network and start investing in your community.

StartupReykjavik Investment day – August 17th, go? #Friday

StartupReykjavik is Icelands first and only accelerator program. Ten teams were picked out of 200 applicants, given 16k, housing and mentorship to go as far as they could with their businesses in ten weeks. Every day they have showed up for work to listen to roughly 50 mentors giving advice in business models, networking and pitching, with hope to get their business going to create value.

Next friday (August 17th, 2012), all these teams will pitch in front of an audience of investors seven minutes each, hoping to find the right investor, explaining why that would make sense and showing of their final products that they have worked on during the period.

There are two ways to attend the event.

1. Reception at Arion-Bank headquarters, Borgartún 5, 101 Reykjavík
2. Online live stream from the event.

If you are an investor and would like to attend or view online streaming, don’t hesitate to ask for an invite and we will send you the invitation and live stream link.

Other reasons you should attend?
1. Are you a runner? Icelands biggest Marathon is on Saturday, August 18th. Sign up here
2. Do you like culture? Culture night 2012 is the country’s largest one-day culture event, with thousands activities for tourists and locals alike ending with big fireworks on midnight.
3. The country has some of the most amazing landscapes known to man. If you like the pure atmosphere, in your in for a treat. (video made by one of the participants http://vimeo.com/44193401)

The teams:

When Gone
First and foremost. WhenGone services people who face premature death, people that are losing their health and people that face risks in everyday life. Through when gone, everyone can leave their loved ones their greatest stories, memories and words in person. Thus allowing people of all ages, races and economic level to leave their legacy for generations to come.

StartupVille
Startupville is a place for investors and start-ups to play the investing game. A social game where investors make virtual investments in real start-ups for virtual equity and in the process they interact, get to know each other better and have fun. It’s also about the investor – startup relationship transcending to a real one where an investor gets to be proactive in the progress of a startup

MyMxLog
Mymxlog is a professional online software service for airline, operators and technicians. They enable management of licences, certificates, training and experience necessary to maintain aircraft in accordance with european regulations.

CloudEngineering
Cloud Engineering is a developing advanced techniques to extract data from a wide range of web-pages and other data sources quickly, reliably and robustly, without requiring any specialised knowledge of programming concepts, HTML structure, or regular expressions. And all within your browser ö no installs required. Our customers will be able to extract online market intelligence which will give them a competitive edge in an ever more competitive world.

Designing Reality
A solution based company specialising in Imaging technology and custom solutions. Offering highly accurate and realistic looking three-dimensional models from photographs.

Live Shuttle
Live-Shuttle is a service for smart phone users to share their experience live. The service allows the user share live footage from his travels around the world and friends and family to stay updated on his current location. Upon returning from a trip the user has a photo or video map of his travels. All incoming media is geo-tagged and sorted to provide the world with live footage from every possible location simultaneously which allows Live Shuttle to broadcast live from interesting events like Music Festivals, Natural Disasters or protests to name a few.

RemindMe
RemindMe is an automatic medical dispenser. For medication to be effective people have to take them according to their doctors advice. Unfortunately only 50% of people take their medicine correctly. Remind me intends to increase medical compliance and people’s quality of life by using a new reminding service for the elderly and forgetful.

GuitarParty.com
Provide high quality lyrics, lessons and guitar tabs to users. One stop shop for lyrics, chords and lessons.

Heilsufar
No one is more aware of his health than the individual himself. People should therefore have the opportunity to access their own health related data and be able to make informed decisions regarding those matters. Heilsufar.is will be the portal where you can request your data to be sent to, where you can add your own information and analyse and compare your health situation to others. Heilsufar is about modernising the area of personal healthcare information

Stream Tags
Stream Tags make more value out of the movie experience by giving viewers the opportunity to tag movies and provide information and buying opportunities relevant for the viewer.

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Posted in Accelerator, Investing, Startup Profile | 1 Comment »

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July 8, 2012

Startup Reykjavik – A Perspective of a founder from India participating in the program

We have a guest post from Ashwin Bhambri, founder of StartupVille and one of the teams accepted into the Startup Reykjavik 2012 program. I have offered to open up the Startup Iceland Blogging platform to the community in Iceland. This is the first post and I would encourage all the startups to reach out to me if you would like to use the Startup Iceland Blog to promote a message. The requirement is very simple, it has to be something to do with Startup ecosystem or Entrepreneurship or Startup Community here in Iceland or anything that you feel would help Entrepreneurs and Startups.

StartupReykjavik is Iceland’s first startup accelerator program however quite different from the run of the mill accelerator programs. First of all the investor is institutional, Arion Bank who is also a chief sponsor of the program. Secondly, the program has the right mix of mentoring and coaching with mentors from varied industries across Iceland and in-house coaches from the Innovit Entrepreneurship Centre and Klak an innovation catalyst initiative. The coaches are actively involved in setting deliverables for each startup and helping them achieve the deliverables within the timeline and towards the end of the program lead mentors take over who have repeated sessions with start-ups they feel they can help

It is interesting that the start-ups in this program are not the ‘usual suspects’ and are quite different from the lot you would generally find at accelerators, all have well defined revenue streams and some are even making money. The diversity here includes a hardware device startup, enterprise applications, subscription based services, search technology and social gaming.

The accelerator here also offers the Icelandic advantage – it’s a flat society here so getting an appointment with say the Director of a Large Airlines and pitching your product is relatively easy and fast also you get a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ quickly. It’s a small place so you can cover ground fast, just amazing for business development and most of all it’s about the people here who are very enthusiastic about the place becoming a startup hub. Also, the accelerator is open to applicants from all over the world

Here’s a look at the start-ups,

  1. Mymxlog – Mymxlog enables the management of licences, certificates, training and experience necessary to comply with European Aviation regulations.
  2. Cloud Engineering – Cloud Engineering provides data extraction technology. We create tools which will revolutionize the way you gather content from the web
  3. Guitar Party – GuitarParty provides music enthusiasts with a way to learn their favorite songs using a unique user interface,  songbooks and video lessons
  4. Live Shuttle – Live Shuttle is a free service for smart phone users where they share their experience Live with their friends, family and the world.
  5. StartupVille – StartupVille is a place for investors and start-ups to play. A social game where investors make virtual investments in start-ups
  6. Stream Tags – Watch movies online with friends via webcam. Now, you can get information on anything onscreen you see or hear and buy it.
  7. Automatic 3D – Creation of high accuracy three-dimensional models using standard two-dimensional photographs and computer vision.
  8. Heilsufar – internet health-bank for individuals. All your health related data in one place including diet and fitness
  9. When Gone – WhenGone is a web based tool to record messages where people leave their last words/advice to their loved ones, to be viewed after passing.
  10. Eski Tech – We are developing RemindMe, an automatic medicine dispenser. Many people struggle with their medicine intake and RemindMe is aimed at making that process easier.
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April 26, 2012

Startup Iceland Conference – Go/No Go decision April 28

I have been writing about all the challenges of hosting a conference. We have the speakers lined up, we believe this is a conference that would be a nice platform for us to showcase Iceland and Icelandic startups and celebrate Entrepreneurship. But I am faced with the brutal fact today… our main sponsor pulled out!

I am left with no other option but to give it a couple of more days before I can cut my losses and move on. There is only one way to host this conference and that is if there is participation. There are 294 people who signed up, 161 who have said they are  going to this conference but there is no ticket sales I have no recourse but to call it a failed show. The current ticket sales is obviously embarrassing… I have experienced the challenge every entrepreneur goes through. I have reached out to other businesses in Iceland who could sponsor this event but I am not holding my breath. I am hoping to get some good news to move forward but I also don’t want to wait too long to do this then I would have no recourse to gracefully manage expectations with the other sponsors who have committed effort into the conference.

If there is any way you all think you can help, please reach out to me. I know what would save the conference and the workshop and I think you know it as well.

Posted in Fail | 5 Comments »

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April 12, 2012

Golden Egg, Seed Forum, Startup Iceland… a lot happening

The last couple of weeks have been incredible to watch, I truly believe Spring is in the air. First of The Golden Egg Competition

was conducted and the winner were announced. Second, Seed Forum has gotten a face lift and is happening tomorrow and some bird told me that there is going to be some major announcement… ok, I know what it is… Startup Reykjavik is going to be announced. So what is Startup Reykjavik? I have written a lot about this, lobbied with many people for it and I am extremely happy to see it take shape. I am very impressed to see Arion Bank is taking the leadership role in this effort. If you are a startup or want to do a startup I highly encourage you to apply to Startup Reykjavik. The deadline is May 7th, and it is not much involved. The requirement is NOT to build a business plan but to focus on how you are going to form a kick ass team focused on execution and building your Minimum Viable Product.

I know Kristjan and Eythor are going to work really hard to make Iceland the best place to incubate and accelerate a startup. My hope and vision is that Iceland becomes the magnet for early stage European companies and Startup Reykjavik becomes the best in the world for accelerators…

well, if you are going to dream at all dream big! Right? There has been an explosion of Accelerators around the world, I believe Iceland offers a unique advantage, once again I have written about it here, here and more recently here. With the Global Accelerator Network link established through Startup Reykjavik, there is absolutely no reason why Startups cannot build companies in Iceland that can scale, expand and solve problem around the world. It is one of the steps to build a sustainable startup/entrepreneurial ecosystem.am focused on execution.

The second piece to this puzzle is Startup Iceland the Conference focused on Entrepreneurship and Startups. We need to have a yearly event focused on Venture Investing, Entrepreneurship and Startups which kicks off ideas, initiatives and themes. This year it is going to be about building sustainable startup ecosystems. We will start marketing the conference soon given it has taken a little longer that we anticipated to get the website up and running. If you have not booked your ticket I highly recommend you do, it is well worth it. It is from 9:00 to 15:00, opportunity to network with other entrepreneurs not just from Iceland but from around the world, Matt Wilson, of Under 30 CEO is marketing a packaged trip for Entrepreneurs in the US to participate in Startup Iceland. The cost includes lunch, refreshments, coffees etc and it is going to be in Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre. Did I mention we are going to have very prominent speakers like Brad Feld, Brad Burnham, Dr.Ted Zoller and Alexander Osterwalder participating? As part of the conference we are going to have a Whole Day Hands-on Workshop conducted by Alexander Osterwalder on Business Model Generation. Here are the workshop details… It is jam packed day where you get the same benefit of attending an MBA program in a year.

Posted in Accelerator, Entrepreneurship, Investment Thesis, Strategy | 6 Comments »

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March 17, 2012

Starting Up Iceland

I have been frantically meeting and organizing the Startup Iceland Conference, here is the Facebook Event Page. While we are organizing this, the constant question that I get is will we be able to fund this conference can we raise the money needed to hold the conference. I am totally transparent about how I am trying to organize this. The cost of putting up this conference is quite a bit but many of the sponsors have stepped up, namely Arion Bank, Icelandair, Kosmos and Kaos, Reykjavik University and the US Embassy in Iceland. If we can pull this off it is going to be the start of something awesome, but as I promised before if we crash and burn it is going to be totally out in the open for everyone to see :)

The website design has come out really nice, I am hoping that we can finish all the fine touches and launch it in the next couple of days. I have a talented team who are a startup in their own right, who have stepped up to sponsor the website… how cool is that? A Startup Sponsoring the Starting up of Iceland. I digress, but we have our major sponsor also committed to sponsoring Eric Ries to participate in the conference. I have sent the agreement to Eric’s Agent lets keep our fingers crossed and hope he agrees to come. I already have an awesome speaker list lined up:

His Excellency Olafur Ragnar Grimsson – The President of Iceland
Brad Feld – Partner Foundry Group
Brad Burnham – Partner Union Square Ventures
Rebeca Hwang – CEO youNoodle.com
Hilmar Veigar Petursson – CEO CCP Games
Hilmar B. Janusson – EVP of R&D Ossur

The Computer Science Department in Reykjavik University has agreed to host the Hackathon, the Recktor of Reykjavik University has been awesome and totally wants to support the effort. So far, I have been very excited about the developments and I think we are well on the way… but we need more people to participate to make this an awesome event so please share the links to signup with your network and Lets Do This! My vision is to make Startup Iceland like Iceland Airwaves, in the first quarter of the year. A yearly event that is focused on Startups, Entrepreneurship and Starting New… hey! it is Spring after all! although it does not seem like it when I look out of the window.

Posted in Bootstrapping, Entrepreneurship | 1 Comment »

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