How to create the ideal team for a startup 

The class yesterday was interesting. My goal has always been to own my own company and be my own boss. Bala raised the question what are the right and wrong reasons for starting a startup. Many of you will probably think, I will be my own boss, make a lot of money and have the flexibility of working on my own time schedule, like I thought. Apparently these are all the wrong reasons. Starting your own startup is hard and stressful, you will be working all the time, have no money and be everybody else’s slave. The right reason according to Bala and other entrepreneurs, is that you should have a vision for a different future, a dream that keeps you awake at night. This made sense for me as passion drives me and gives me strength when the times get tough.

It is hard to start a startup and you can’t do it alone unless you’re superman. You will need a team with the right combinationof skills. There are three important components your team needs to be successful; understanding of technology, understanding of customer behavior and operational skills. Technology is everything today and if you don’t understand it or have someone on your team that does you’re screwed. You will also have to have someone that can connect people together and sell your product. If your vision of why your product is great is communicated in the right way the likelihood of your startup being a success is higher. Finally you will need someone to keep everything together, someone that can take care of the operations and makes sure everybody is working together on reaching the goal. When building a great team you will also have to take into consideration that you will be spending a lot of time with your cofounders so it does not hurt if you know them, if your interest align and that you can have fun with them even when times get tough.

The quality of the team also matters when you are at the stage of getting someone to invest in your idea likes Bala points out in his blog post, Framework to build Great Companies. People that are relentlessly resourceful and get things done are more appealing to investors. The team should also think about how good a fit the investor is to the team as the investor often serves as the teams mentor.   

When I was thinking about who I wanted on my team in this class I looked through the student list and spotted out people that I had worked with before and knew shared my passion of excellence. I am optimistic about the times to come and look forward to the upcoming thirteen weeks of blood sweat and tears.

How do I get an idea for a startup?

I really enjoyed my first class. We had a guest speaker, Doctor Sean Wise the author of Startup Opportunities: know whento quit your day job. Before the class we could send inn questions that Sean, would answer during a Skype interview. The questions were helpful as they got me on the thinking path of finding an idea, which is the first step in starting a startup. Other important aspects you need to have when starting a startup is a product. Bala pointed out that great products come from great ideas which can lead to a great company. Finally you need a good team who shares your enthusiasm and can work together executing the idea.

But how do I get an idea? Sean, pointed out that the idea can be top down or bottom up. Bottom up is where you thinking of a solution to a problem people have to deal with in their day to day lives. Two years ago I got a bottom up idea, I was putting my food on a plate in the office cafeteria and was wondering the nutritional value of what was on my plate. Like so many other people I had no idea of how much protein, fat and carbohydrates where on my plate. I asked my coworkers why no one had come up with an app that could just tell me. I told them that I was going to make it happen. Of cores they laughed at me as the technical part of food recognition app with a good user interface is extremely complicated. The stubborn part of me though that this could be done, I was going to make it happen. I decided to contact my good friend, who is studying computer science and told her I had an idea for our company. We often talk about creating something huge, working together and concurring the world. I would look out for the business part and she would take care of the technical part. She told me that we should sign up for an idea competition at Reykjavik University. To make a long story short our idea won and we received a grant from Rannis for developing our idea further. At this time we were both extremely busy people, she working on hear studies and me with my job so the idea did not get the loving and caring it needed and faded out. Now google is training itself to count calories in food photos.  My idea was good but I was lacking the technical aspect to make it a great product and the team laced the passion of making it a reality.

I hope that this class will help me go further with the next idea. My mission is finding an idea that will solve a problem in people’s day to day lives. Who knows maybe my team will have a great idea that will be transformed in to a great product that will lead to a great company, the next unicorn. 

How to Start a Startup

My name is Agnes and I started this blog as a part of an assignment in one of my master's classes in Reykjavik University. Since I was a little girl I always wanted to be a powerful business woman and own my own company. I got really excited when I saw that one of the courses that I could take was named How to Start a Startup, I thought this is my chance to think outside of the box and challenge myself. It did not hurt that Bala Murugan Kamallakharan was the lecturer. For you that do not know him he is an entrepreneur with great experience when it comes to startups and mentoring, you should google him.

A little bit about myself. I decided to go and take my bachelor degree following the global financial crisis in 2008, as I knew I needed to get an education to be competitive in the market. I chose a degree in business at Reykjavik University, emphasizing on finance. You may think, why business, didn’t Iceland have enough of unemployed business people? Yes that is true but I had the feeling that I could learn from the mistakes others had made. I always wanted to be a business woman and I was not going to make one crash crush my dream. Throughout my studies I constantly reminded myself that I wanted to get as much as I could out of each program. To increase my chances of landing a job when I graduated I decided to do an internship with KPMG advisory in my second last semester. When the internship was over KPMG offered me a job. In my last semester I wrote my final theses along with working full time at KPMG advisory and graduated in the spring of 2012.

In the autumn of 2014 I decided to go and finish my master’s degree in corporate finance. I thought it would be good to get some work experience before continuing my studies. Now I highly recommended it as my understanding of the course materials is much deeper now than before and I get more out of the courses I take. I love to keep busy and I decided to go for a full-time study along with a full-time job at KPMG advisory. The upside is that I will graduate at end of year 2015, so the extremely high work load is only for a short period of time.

What’s next? That is for me to know and for you to find out. I intend to posts weekly, sharing with you my journey to excellence.