Last wednesday I started attending a new course in Reykjavik University. The course name is How to start a startup and is tought by Bala Murughan Kamallakharan. Bala is originally from India but has lived in Iceland for few years now. Bala used to work for Glitnir but found himself lost in the crisis 2008 when he became unemployed. He then thought that he needed to redefine his future plans because prior to that he had always been a hard worker making everybody else rich but him. Now it was time to turn the table and his path was gonna lead him to working with alot of innovative and promising young peoble in building up startups. He sure made a good name for himself as he was soon gonna become one of the founders of GreenCloud and Clara which are probably two of the most successful Icelandic startups the past years. I feel that it's safe to say that he must have a good eye for promising startups and I look forward expressing my future ideas with him and the world.
How Bala expressed his situation of loosing the job and being lost in the world reminded me alot of my self about one year ago when I lost my job at one of the major Asset mangement departments in Iceland. I had then for the first time of my life an experience of the same thing, coming home and not knowing what I was gonna do the next following weeks. I actually did take alot of thinking about me and the world and actually had decided to start my own company but ended up doing nothing about that idea and accepting the first job offering I got. I wonder where I would be today if I would have just tried coming up with 4 or 5 ideas and tried executing them all in order for at least one of them to prosper.
It's safe to say that this first class did immediately have affect on how my view on expressing my self about my ideas to the world. The first concrete lesson was loose the jacket and speak upload about your ideads. Prior I had regulary had some creative ideas but somehow I almost only trusted my girlfriend for them and never did anything more with these ideas. I'm sure that most peoble actually feel the same. Bala told us that when we get ideas we should blog about the idea, share it with the world, instead of keeping the idea just for our self. When we get ideas and they are good it's very likely that someone else has also had that idea anyway but the most useful thing for a person in converting a creative idea into a innovation is getting other's peoble view on it and support.
Bala remind's me of a philosophist, at least about how he expresses he's view on the world. He teaches us how to gain advantage on the problems we meet in life and thinking of them as an opportunity which is essentially how many ideas are found and later become products. An entrepreneur opportunity is likely to be found when you find yourself in a situation which many other peoble may find them self in as well.
Bala was not the only person that was gonna share his wisdom this day because we also were so lucky that Bala had arranged an Skype meeting with Professor Sean Wise, co-author of the book Startup Opportunities which I am currently reading. Sean talked about how the current methods of business are outdated and pointed that we should not make things to complicated at the beginning like we have been told in school. We should not start by making a complicated business plan instead we should just make a demo of our product and go straight to the market, eventhough the product doesn't work or not and see if peoble like the idea and get a feeling about how much they would wanna pay for it if you would go further with your idea. This man actually works as a mentor or specialist in evaluating other's peoble ideas. What he does is telling other peoble, his clients if their ideas suck or are brilliant.
Having listened to these two bright men about how to express my self in the future when I get a feeling about somehting innovative I had a talk with a good friend and coworker of mime. We decided to buy our first domain for an idea we talked about which we might start working on soon with some other peoble.
All to all it's safe to say that the lesson of this day was if you get a promising idea you should share it with the world, make a facebook page and see if peoble like your idea because having that as an reference when seeking investors is probably one hell of an indicator.
The next 15 weeks I will be blogging weekly about this class. I'll do my best in sharing with the world my ideas and experience having Bala as an mentor and maybe there might end up being some carreer changes, eventhough I'm really happy today in my current job. But it's fair to say that it's actually a possibility that I'm gonna be working for my own company in few weeks and maybe one day not be a slave of my paycheck, making other peoble rich.
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