How to start a Startup!
That was one of my first courses at the Reykjavik University. Before I'm going to talk about the first lecture I would like to use the opportunity to give you an understanding of why I chose this course.
Let's start with the name 'Startup': you hear this word so many times a day, you find articles about startups in every newspaper and almost every magazine. It seems like everybody is just talking about this type of company, but what makes the startup scene so special and why is there such a big hype about this fast growing business model. Well, to be perfectly honest we had these kinds of rapidly growing 'bubbles' already a few times and the last crash just happened 7 years ago here in Iceland...
But the topic startup keeps on going, year by year. It doesn't matter from which country you are, even smaller countries or developing countries, you will always hear and read something about the startup scene all over the world and even after crises.
So what I'm expecting from the course and our group project for the next upcoming months is: How does a Startup work? Why is not every company supposed to be a startup? How to handle all the business ideas in my mind? How to develop a strategy? How to attract venture capital and get money from other people for my business? And finally how to get 'rich' (on experience of course)?
So quiet a lot of things which are already on my mind, but let's review the first lecture with Bala Kamallakharan.
The course is based on 3 books, which are required for us to read:
1) Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
2) The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
3 ) Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job
The first book is from Peter Thiel, who is born in Frankfurt -GER- he lives in the US now. Quiet a big name in the startup business, you should probably know him as one of the first investors in facebook, he co-founded PayPal and manages a VC fund now.
The third book was written by Sean Wise, a professor of entrepreneurship. Impressive thing that Bala got him for a skype session during our first lecture for around 45 minutes. He talked about his book, how the entrepreneurship became part of his life and his family and how he deals with that now, he gave us some unique recommendations and we were able to ask a bunch of questions.
Furthermore we talked about the definition of a startup and entrepreneurship, Bala made the lecture interactive and asked many questions about what we already know about startups and gave us the opportunity to help forming the course which makes it even more interesting. We also talked about 2 out of the 4 most important areas, like if you do really well in these chances are good that you will be successful.
The time just flew by and at the end we started finding our groups for the project which is probably going to be an adventure for the next couple of month, but now I'm looking really forward starting my first startup.
#1lecture #HtsaS #RU
http://startupiceland.com/2015/08/21/how-to-start-a-startup-lecture-1/
