We discovered The Startup Kids more than a year ago, when they launched their project on Kickstarter.
After their successful crowdfunding campaign, in which they raised more than 300% of their fundraising goal, we lost them for a while. Now, a few weeks before their official launch, we contacted the two Icelandic entrepreneurs behind it to get the last news!
Right here below, my interview with Vala Halldorsdottir, co-director along with Sesselja Vilhjalmsdottir, of the documentary.
In a tweet, “The Startup Kids” is…
A documentary about young web entrepreneurs in the US and Europe.
Who are Vala and Sesselja?
We are two entrepreneurs from Iceland. We started our first company back in 2009 when we made a board game that was very successful in Iceland. Since then our company has taken on various projects, one of them being The Startup Kids documentary. Now we are working on our next startup Kinwins.
When and why did you decide to start working on this documentary?
The idea came when we were working on our first company; we were so motivated after our success that we wanted to motivate others to do the same. A documentary would be a great way to that, we would learn ourselves and hopefully motivate others to do the same. The main aim of the movie is to motivate people to become entrepreneurs.
How did you fund it?
We mostly funded it ourselves, but we also got a small grant from the European Union and then we did a Kickstarter campaign that helped us a lot, along with some local sponsors.
Can you list some of the interviewees? How did you select them?
The main characters are six very different, but all very ambitious, entrepreneurs. They are Zach Klein (the founder of Vimeo), Brian Wong (the founder of Kiip), Jessica Mah (the founder of InDinero) Alexander Ljung (the founder of Soundcloud), Leah Culver (the founder of Grove) and Ben Way (an entrepreneur from the UK).
We decided right away that we wanted to feature entrepreneurs from the US and Europe. We interviewed over 80 people so we had a difficult task editing that down to the 15 people who are in the film. We chose them because we thought they fitted the story best.
Some of them are very successful entrepreneurs. How did you reach them?
It was like a snowball effect. In the beginning we didn’t know anybody and just cold-emailed the people we were interested in meeting. If we managed to get one good interview we always asked if they could introduce us to some other entrepreneurs who would be interesting to interview.
I saw the trailer of “The Startup Kids” and it seems to be very promising. Is it already available to the public? How are you going to distribute it?
We are doing screenings right know, anybody can host their own screenings. If you are interested please get in touch with us here. In the beginning of March it will be available online on iTunes etc.
I look forward to seeing the full film. Thanks a lot for your time and good luck!
Thank you! In the end we just want to say that our biggest expectation is that some young people will see the documentary and think: ‘wow, I can do this’ and then create something awesome 🙂
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