“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” Aristotle.
If there’s one thing I’m truly grateful to Hyper Island for, it’s the inspiration to learn the things I don’t know anything about, by trying them out as I go along.
Some of my best lessons come from the different people who gave talks at HI about how they didn’t always know what the end result would be. And yet took a leap of faith in the area of their passion, doing what they knew how to, doing them well and then picking up everything else along the way either online or by asking others for help. And succeeding. And sometimes failing. But the failure was a learning in itself. And it helped prepare them for the next adventure.
Hearing stories after stories left me so inspired… and then I saw my opportunity in the form of a Facebook post about the Web Summit in Dublin.
Elon Musk was there last year — and I’m a fan!
And Bono u2 too. All the who’s whos in the tech world attend this — Forbes calls it the №1 tech summit of the year and new startups get funded at this event.
What got me even more excited was that they gave a limited number of new tech startups the opportunity to showcase their ideas for free (it costs 10 grand for big companies, so hey it’s an awesome opportunity — one I don’t want to miss). You just had to register, pitch your idea and hope you get selected.
It was time to take a brave step and try something new. Something I didn’t know anything about. Something exciting and scary and dangerous all at the same time.
I had to sign up especially since I was on my Hyper Island startup project and my team was really serious about launching something profitable that could change the world. We were already getting advice from Venture Capitalists and friends who were doing successful start-ups on how to realise our dreams. We had many ideas and hypothesises in place. So I signed up rather rapidly, and registered my teammates (without their knowledge of course — do what you need to and if they’re pissed off, apologise latter).
When I got an email saying we were shortlisted and needed to do an interview — I decided it was time to tell the team and…
