OpenCoffee Athens XV took place in the 7th of October. Guest star was Jason Calacanis, the guy behind Weblogs Inc and mahalo.com. He talked to us completely informal, just a small notebook, no powerpoint, not even a laptop. Although I have seen many people talking on stage, Jason’s keynote was absolutely stunning.
He talked about his experience, his mistakes and his view. But most important, he motivated everyone in the room. I left the Open Coffee and I went home with a desire to do things, to work. There is no excuse such as “I have to make some money, I don’t have time to do what I want”. Nobody works 24/7, there is always some free time. In that free time, you can work on your side projects.
As Jason said, there is only one difference between entrepreneurs and wanabe-entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs dared to start something! Failure is part of the game, nobody is mr.Perfect. But, as I already have stated, there is always something to gain, even from your biggest failures. Jason decided not to sell his first company for 20 millions and 9 months later he shut it down. Although he was back in square one, he managed to come back and built Weblogs Inc. He dared to do things, he worked hard and nothing was given to him for free.
However, motivation is one piece of the puzzle. One other piece is getting organized. He suggested that we create groups specializing in specific topics, like graphics design, Amazon EC2 etc. Sharing the knowledge will make everybody better, greek start-up community will improve and, who knows, maybe next year there will be some greek start-ups in TechCrunch 50..
PS. The day after the OC event, some of us had breakfast with Jason. Great speaker, great guy to hang out with, he even talked about greek basketball and he promised to be in Greece again real soon.. Nice meeting you Jason!
[photo via flickr.com, user: nsyll]
