It’s been an inspiring experience to attend the Start Up Day 2016 to get a “tangible” feeling of the ecosystem of entrepreneurship and innovation in the startup hub – Stockholm.
Here are some of the notes which I made during the speeches that I found interesting and worth spreading.
The day was started by the talk by Nick Kaye, Co-funder of Klarna:
– “Success is luck combines a lot of work.”
– “You need time to do some reflection to know how you are satisfied.” (Nick has found the “White Space” during his vocation, which is doing good by his social entrepreneurship project to be launched during this summer and he referred it as a way to refuel.)
– “Don’t go to all the network events, office is where all the work is done.” (He mentioned that it is important to meet people and exchange ideas, but don’t be obsessed about it.)
Niklas Adalberth, Co-founder, Klarna
The talk “Can our society cope with AI?” given by Christoph Auer-Welsbach, IBM Waston BD Leader Europe, also impressed me a lot.
– “A machine will always reflect the values of its creator.”
– “Human need to adapt quickly and be changed for the new era.”
– “AI is a tool to assist human, not to replace them.”
– “AI could be considered during startups’ product design and development process.” (To my understanding, he was suggesting that startups could adopt AI as new features to improve their products and services, and create more values for users.)
Christoph Auer-Welsbach, IBM Waston BD Leader Europe, IBM
The whole day speeches was ended by Simone Giertz, the famous “Queen of shitty robots”. She builds many robots that are fun but spectacularly useless things. Her videos went virus and famous worldwide. In the talk she explained why she is doing this:
– “The best way to learn is by doing it.” (Learning by doing is her motto.)
– “Idea first, tools later.” (For me, this concept that it is not difficult to implement as long as you have the idea, is little bit hard for me, an engineer student, to understand at first. When we want to build something, the first thing come to our minds is “Is it feasible?”. However, I think, for a creator, innovator, entrepreneur, feasibility might be an constraint for thoughts and innovation.)
– “Your ideas might be smarter than you.” (She said she always got many comments about her video on how her robots could be used to help others’ lives, which she didn’t thought about before. The idea you think is useless might be useful for others.)
Simone Giertz, Inventor / Queen of Shitty Robots
Here is a short video about her “shitty” projects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcxlSLNH5M0
It’s an intensive day full of ideas and knowledge. The words “#Luck” and “#HardWork” said by Nick in the beginning are used throughout the day by Moderator, Aurore Belfrage. Let’s see how these two words accompany us in our journey of entrepreneurship.
By Zhihao Yang