Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

GETTING STARTUP ICELAND STARTED

We will start with the story of Startup Iceland (http://startuprev.com/i1). Although you may think of Iceland as a tiny rock in the middle of the ocean or the focal point of the global financial crises that started in 2008, today this country of 300,000 has a nascent but thriving startup community due to the efforts of a handful of entrepreneurs. One of them, who I’ve had the pleasure to get to know over the past year, is Bala Kamallakharan. Following is a description of how Bala helped get Startup Iceland started.

I always get crazy ideas when I have a lot of free time. The day was October 5, 2008, Sunday, and I was on a plane back to Iceland, where the government of Iceland had just announced that they would take over 75 percent of Glitnir, the third largest bank in Iceland. I was the newly appointed Head of India for Glitnir in Mumbai, and over the weekend I had been frantically trying to get hold of my boss, the CEO of the bank, or the CFO, or anyone who would pick up the phone and tell me what the hell was going on. No one did. That was the financial crisis that I saw from far, far away. The entire banking and financial system in Iceland had collapsed. I came back to Iceland and within a couple of weeks I was promptly fired from my job and the entire International division of the bank was shut down.

The country of Iceland revolted and the government of Iceland was brought down. There was an emergency government. I had a lot of time on my ...