We’re looking for someone awesome to join us in our San Francisco office!

About CLARA

CLARA is a funded startup disrupting the way companies treat their customers. We just launched in the US and are growing rapidly. We offer community analytics, monitoring and engagement for more than 100 enterprise clients, including Sony, CCP, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft and Vodafone. At CLARA, 16 experienced and energetic persons work full time towards world domination.

About the gig;

• Work directly with the CEO
• Work on sales related projects
• Create and execute a Social Media Marketing campaign
• Support VP of Sales in daily tasks
• Researching potential leads
• Get great ideas and follow them through
• Brainstorm business strategies + Have a blast!

What we require;

• Business Administration student focusing on: Development, Marketing, and Sales
• A desire to become a top tier sales and marketing person
• True to your word (do what you say you’ll do)
• A positive, creative, and results driven attitude
• Being a video game player really helps.

Perks and Benefits;

Although this is an unpaid internship we offer;

• A very compelling environment to learn and gain experience rapidly.
• We are flexible on work hours, but in return we expect great work and that projects are delivered so that you can be proud of them.
• We support healthy habits and work out every day
• Completion of Internship hours for college credit course
• Experience the launch of a product in early stages and in a Startup environment

Do you know someone awesome that might fit this profile?

Interested? Email Rick Vidrio (rick at clarahq dot com) for further details!

You can describe a nations Constitution in multiple ways. The description I love the most is “The Nations Operating System” one (or even the BIOS). Simply because a constitution is the bases for everything else; it’s the fundamental principles on how the government and organization (applications) should work.

Constitutions are not written that often. It’s also not everyday that you get the chance to participate in writing one. My lovely home country, Iceland, is currently doing just that as a few places have mentioned;

• USA Today: Tech-savvy Iceland goes online for new constitution
• CNN: Iceland crowdsourcing its constitution
• Washington Post: Iceland crowdsources its next constitution
• Guardian: Mob rule: Iceland crowdsources its next constitution
• Read Write Web: Iceland Pursues a User-Generated Constitution
• ABC News: Tech-Savvy Iceland Online for New Constitution
• Mashable: Iceland crowdsources its constitution
• BigThink: Crowdsourcing Iceland’s new constitution
• AllTop: Iceland crowdsourcing constitution
• Engaget: In Iceland, constitutions are written on Facebook
• Mother Jones: Iceland Is Crowdsourcing Its Constitution
• ZDnet Iceland taps Facebook to rewrite its constitution
• Good: Iceland Is Crowdsourcing Its New Constitution
• TechDirt: Iceland (a.k.a. The Transparentest Place On Earth) Crowdsources Its New Constitution
• The Atlantice Wire: Iceland Is Crowdsourcing Its New Constitution
• SocialMedia Today: Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitution - A Lesson in Open Source Marketing
• Slashdot: Iceland Taps Facebook To Rewrite Its Constitution

I’ve had the privilege to participate in the process, mostly on the tech side of things but also in the build-up, planning and a lot of viewing from the sideline. 

If your are wondering how to follow Iceland’s steps, look no further, Here is a simple step-by-step guide on how to build a new constitution from scratch.

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On Saturday May 14 2011 TEDx Silicon Valley will gathered some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers at Stanford to discuss social innovation and explore the emerging concept of Living by Numbers.

I predicted ”Watch out for Volcanos”.

On Saterday 21 May 2011 at 19:25 UTC, an eruption began, it was the strongest in Grímsvötn in the last 100 years. It disrupted 900 flights in Greenland, Norway, Svalbard, Denmark, Northern Ireland, England and Northern Germany. 

I’m categorizing this post as #Nostradamus.

Professional

CLARA has a ton of internal goals but I’m not going to go into much details, here are only the main goals that are on my plate;

• Move to the San Francisco Bay Area to be closer to our clients.
• 20x increase in revenue
• Double+ the production output by strengthening the development team with new talents
• Set up a more structured financial management process (boring but necessary for fast growth)
• Conquer planet earth, move to next.

Personal

I’ve usually set my personal goals on the day before my birthday, but now I wanted to join them with my professional goals for 02011 so I’ll break the habit and make them 16 days before my birthday.

• Compete in at least 3 bike competitions
• Train 208 times (cardiovascular, strength and flexibility training)
• Swim 208 miles
• Read 52 books (listening to audiobooks counts as well)
• Meet 52 very smart people and pick their brains

Notes:

• I might add some goals later on.

Creativity at Work conference was held at Reykjavik University 15th of October 02010. I was asked to talk about the hottest start-up on earth.

We had some great talks over there. I loved the enthusiasm in the both the speakers and the crowed. My number one takeaway was that you should rather stay home when you are sad, then when you are sick, because creativity really fosters in happiness.

Here are my slides as well as a few points about what I talked. I could talk forever about our environment, spirit and culture, but here are just a few points. I tried to focus on the office, or to be exact, the bar - we at CLARA are doing whatever we can to to make the place where we spend most of our time, look less like an office and more like an bar. Being a high-tech start-up, that’s basic! The things that we think are needed to run a successful bar/start-up are the following;

• A Keg. Grabbing a beer after work should be as easy as possible.
• Openness. We try to be as open as possible. We have a blog that’s open to all the team members, advisers, board and investors. There we share detailed information on our key performance indicators; progress, money, products and so forth.
• Methods. Living and breathing in an extremely fast environment calls for disciplined methods. We stick to agile project management and love it.
• Team. When everything is put right together, getting awesome talent to join your team is a bit easier. It’s still extremely hard, but a bit easier.
• Organic. We’re not just talking about building an garden in the middle of the office. Also the spirit and the culture must be genuine and organic.

I’m looking forward to learning even more stuff about running a fun start-up / bar - so if you guys have any ideas, don’t hesitate to let me know!

Here’s a quick post about a wheel in downtown Reykjavik and information about when you should spin it, rather then ordering a beer.

On Austurstræti (a street below the main street Laugavegur) in Iceland is a nice little place called The English Pub. I like the atmosphere there and it’s currently my number one place during the workweek when you really need to have a good time. I can highly recommend it for a great Wednesday night out (Wednesdays are the new Thursdays).

They have live shows every night, but their main attraction is the lucky wheel, for 1.500 ISK you can spin the wheel and drink away the prize! 

But how lucky is it?⁽¹⁾

Here we can see that there are 16 different fields.

1. 2 Shots
2. Spin Again
3. 1 Meter Beer (10 Small Beers)
4. Sorry
5. 3 Large Beers
6. Spin Again
7. 1 Large Beer
8. Sorry
9. 2 Large Beers
10. Sorry
11. 8 Large Beers
12. Sorry
13. 1 Large Beer
14. Spin Again
15. 4 Large Beers
16. Sorry

If you hit “Spin Again” you spin the wheel again so we don’t need to take that into account when calculating the expected outcome, that leaves 13 fields that matter.

We know how much each of the items costs at The English Pub charges;

• Shots are 700.- ISK each.
• Small Beers are 600.- ISK each.
• Large beers are 800.- ISK each.
• A Sorry is free of charge.

From this information we can derive the value of each outcome;

1. 2 Shots = 1.400.- ISK
2. 1 Meter Beer (10 Small Beers) = 6.000.- ISK
3. Sorry = 0.- ISK
4. 3 Large Beers = 2.400.- ISK
5. 1 Large Beer = 800.- ISK
6. Sorry = 0.- ISK
7. 2 Large Beers = 1.600.- ISK
8. Sorry = 0.- ISK
9. 8 Large Beers = 6.400.- ISK
10. Sorry = 0.- ISK
11. 1 Large Beer = 800.- ISK
12. 4 Large Beers = 3.200.- ISK
13. Sorry = 0.- ISK

With very simple calculations we find that the expected value of a fair spin⁽²⁾ is 1.738.- ISK. That is higher then 1.500.- ISK, the cost of spinning the wheel.

So to conclude;

Spin the Wheel!

⁽¹⁾ I’m not going to take into account the fun side of getting 8 large beer with a couple of your friends and how that effects the fun’nes of the evening.

⁽²⁾ I’m assuming that the wheel is not rigged and each field

Update 1

Below is a simulation done my friend Agnar Darri. He graphs expected total value as a function of total number of spins.

Update 2

Update suggested by Björgvin Ragnarsson.

When you feel like ordering a meter of beer you probably won’t ask for 10 small beers. The small beer at English is about 330 ml. If you use the liter price for large beers the cost is 5.280.- instead of 6.000.- so this changes the Expected Value to 1.683.- ISK

We still Spin The Wheel!

Update 3

It turns out that the beer is way cheaper on weekdays before 11 o’clock now in October or only 500 ISK. So now we calculate for both Update 2 (Using the liter price of large beers for the meeter) and spinning on a week day. That makes the expected value 1.092.- which is lower then the cost of spinning the wheel! 

Also, we calculate that when the price of beer is less then 707.- ISK, you shouldn’t Spin the Wheel.

Don’t Spin the Wheel!

(…on weekdays before 23:00 in October)

Ice Cream at CLARA today! We just signed an agreement with CCP. We are delivering the awesome CLARA system to them 1. of Oct

Skýrr, the biggest the biggest IT company in Iceland is doing their annual “Haustráðstefna Skýrr“ right now. About 700 people attended to see the likes of James Gosling - the father of Java, Hjalmar Gislason in DataMarket, Andres Jonsson the social PR guru of Iceland, Helga Waage from Mobilitus and two Alli’s from CCP. Also a ton of other great speakers talked alot about a bunch of different stuff.

I was asked to speak about the state of Icelandic companies engaged in New Media.

The main points where about

1. A quick introduction about CLARA and the things we have been working on.
2. A story about Brimborg, an Icelandic car dealership, that has been very engaged in social media in Iceland.
3. The difference in the discussion in traditional media and new media. I took a political example from Reykjavik and our comedian / mayor.
4. Another story about how a big bank in Iceland listened to the discussion about a charity they where running alongside the Reykjavik Marathon - they found out that they needed to push it way harder for people to contribute.

The talk was in Icelandic so the slides where that as well, here they are:

Haustráðstefna Skýrr on Prezi

Today we at CLARA closed a 1 million dollar round of funding that will provide the working capital we need to scale up and get us ready for world dominance. Until now we have been making every penny count in bootstrap mode. I’m writing this to explain my thoughts about bootstrapping, what it has done for us and why others should do the same.

When I first heard that we should “Bootstrap” it left a huge question mark on my face. I immediately thought about my statistics courses in the university; why in the world would my start up need to to derive estimates of confidence intervals for estimators of parameters of some statistical distributions. I actually thought about some of the R programs I wrote and started thinking how that could be applied. I eventually said that there was no need for that anytime soon, maybe a few years down the road. That left an even bigger question mark on the face of the guy I was chatting with. 

It turns out that Bootstrapping is also a phrase in business finance. It’s about keeping a tight fist on all your expenses and knowing that Cash Flow is more important than your mother. Something we’ve always been keen on doing but never had the correct lingo for it. In the past two years, we’ve put a huge emphasis on doing stuff that people, especially the people that pay us, like. The team has been very focused on organic growth and building our company the way we want.

In my mind, starting with little to no cash and working your way up is a very healthy start for a young company having to figure out how to make a great product.

Here are my Top 6 reasons why I think it’s important to start by bootstrapping:

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I just came from an talk at the Reykjavik University. Two young students decided on their own to host a series of lectures on the importance of having a interdisciplinary background. They asked me to talk about three things:

1. About CLARA, our startup.
2. How we use software in our field.
3. How is it going? What have you learned?

Here are the slides from my talk:

Interdisciplinary Start-ups on Prezi