This week I had my first “How to start a start-up” lesson by Bala Kamallakharan.
The teacher is what we can call an inexhaustible guy. After studying in India, he moved to the US where he studied Economics, International Trade and Finance at LSU. He worked for some MNC (Capgemini and Glitnir, an Icelandic bank) before being very attracted by the start up world. Now, he is fully working in the start up sphere : business angel, founder of Start up Iceland and, sometimes teacher. If you want to know a bit more about him and Start Up Iceland, you should read his blog and especially this article where he shares his vision of entrepreneurship : http://startupiceland.com/2015/04/01/you-are-not-a-lottery-ticket
The first learnings that I will remember after this lesson are very easy to understand, but maybe a bit more complicated to turn into.
What : “A start-up is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future” Peter Thiel in Zero to one
Why : To become a unicorn (a start-up evaluated at more than $1 billion dollars.)
How : Mixing the 4 things to succeed : the idea, the product, the team and the execution.
When : “Now because yesterday has already passed and tomorrow it is too late”
After that, we had a call with Dr. Sean Wise, a Canadian entrepreneur, quite famous across the Atlantic and especially for having write a couple of books related to the entrepreneurship and having taken part into the TV Show Dragon’s Den (the Canadian version of Shark tank, I guess). He answered some questions about entrepreneurship:
“What is the best way to create an idea ?”
There is no miracle solution, but there are at least 3 different known ways. The “bottom-up” is when you have a problem and you try to solve it, the “top-down” is when you have a technology, a passion and you want to use it to start a start up.
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