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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The Golden Egg, Innovit’s Entrepreneurship Competition ended the other day with the following winners:

In third place we saw Nude Magazine, A great new Icelandic online fashion magazine and in first place where ReMake Electric, saving you loads of money and making your house safer by bringing us the next generation of electric safety. Unfortunately not everybody can get the great runner-up, this years runner up was the Transmit Team with Brand Asset management program Brand Capital. I’m looking forward to the Beta!

I was asked to talk my experience during the last two years and share my thoughts on what we thought was important in starting a startup. 

The following five points are things that I believe have helped us a lot;

1. Talk.

Whenever you get the chance, talk about your idea with all the enthusism you’ve got. You will get better at explaining your ideas, get great advice about your next steps and people will gladly introduce you to people who can help you.

2. Speed.

Do everything as fast as you can and in as little time as you can. Build a prototype and throw it out there to get feedback. Fix it as fast as you can and iterate. You should always have something new to say to the people asking you, especially if they are investors, they love progress.

3. Honesty.

Although you want to hype your idea or product, building to high expectations is never, ever, a good thing. You should be very proud of the what you got today and talk very highly of those things.

4. Team.

When everything is going great, you will run out of time and will need more talent to join you. When you get to that point, hire people that are way smarter then you. 

5. Have Fun

Starting a company is just about the most difficult thing I can think of. It’s going to take way more time then you can ever imagine. So you’ve got to have some fun while doing so. 

This is translated from Icelandic. This is also just a short recap. I hoping to spend some more time on writing this. 

I had the privalge of working with the Kaufman foundation to help with the Global Entrepreneurship Week

For one week, millions of young people around the world join a growing movement of entrepreneurial people, to generate new ideas and to seek better ways of doing things. Countries across six continents come together to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, an initiative to inspire young people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity. To think big. To turn their ideas into reality. To make their mark.

Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson and I made a short video explaining the concept: