Today I read an insightful post by Paul Graham on how to come up with startup ideas, roughly summarized as “don’t think of startup ideas – start solving your own problems” and alternately as he puts it “live in the future and build what seems interesting”. It inspired me to share with you why I co-founded Gauss – The People Magnet.
tl;dr – I’m living in the future, building something interesting, solving my own problem.
W00t!
Yesterday I was in Oslo, Norway for the national Nordic Startup Awards where our startup Gauss – The People Magnet were nominated in three categories; Best Bootstrapper, Best International and People’s Choice.
I was amazed and humbled to take home your award, the People’s Choice Award. It means a lot to us to know that there is a lot of people like you out there who believes in us and find what we do meaningful. It keeps us going! Thank you so much!
So see you in the Nordic Startup Awards grand finals in Copenhagen, December 7th!
Recently I was invited with our startup to the Campus Party – the biggest electronic entertainment event with keynotes from rock stars like Paulo Coelho, Yossi Vardi, Don Tapscott and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
It’s no secret that I’ve been a fan of Yossi Vardi for some time, so it was only natural that I was camping out on a front row seat, eager to hear his keynote.
Then about ten minutes in, something unpredictably awesome happened; As I was answering Yossi’s question to “what’s keeping people from executing on their ideas?” shouting “FEAR OF FAILURE!” out loud from the crowd, Yossi told the keynote audience that I should perhaps hold the keynote instead of him and then proceeded to let me pitch Gauss to his whole keynote audience! Needless to say I was pretty gobsmacked.
Watch it as it happened:
This kind of spontaneous generosity completely blew my socks off and caught us totally by surprise!
So thank you, Yossi – I’m incredibly humbled and grateful! You are even cooler than I imagined. I hope we meet again sometime in the future. You rock! :)
Here’s a bonus interview with Dr. Yossi Vardi from CP Europe 2012:
Recently I got to sit down with TechHustlers‘ (@techhustlers) Eric Strait (@ericstrait) and had a conversation via Skype over the atlantic between Cologne, DE and San Marco, TX.
From the post:
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with my new friend, Vidar Andersen, & founding genius behind the “people magnet” app Gauss! We recently had the craziest happenstance way of connecting and believe it or not, we meet each other via Glancee, one of his competitors app at SXSW! He happened to be the closest SXSW event attendee staying near my home, so I thought I would connect. Little did I know, he was actually launching their direct competitor app Gauss. Gauss is a mobile app that let’s you discover and connect with interesting people around you. They describe it as a “People Magnet for your pocket.” I would not just say this and just blow smoke up your a$%, but after Vidar demoed Gauss to me, I was blown away at it made Glancee look like an amature! […]
Wow! Thank you, Eric!
Make my day: Get Gauss on the Apple App Store for free and start discovering new people around you today! :)
Gauss arrived at SXSW in Austing, Texas:
To pitch at Frank Gruber’s (@FrankGruber) TechCocktail SXSW Startuplife Showcase:
Where we met and pitched awesome people like Don Dodge (@dondodge) and Ben Parr (@benparr)…
And got invited to the incredible Startup Weekend VIP party by Déborah and James:
And got interviewed by the wonderful StartupLive:
And Harald Neidhart (@hneidhardt) of MLOVE:
Got invited personally by his awesomeness himself, Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) to the Rackspace / Startup Bus party:
Ate late night post-party pizza with the awesome people of SendGrid:
Thanked the amazing Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) in person for retweeting us:
Pitched the legend Steve Blank (@sgblank):
Who loves Gauss and called it a killer app:
And gave us a signed copy of his new book with this awesome testimonial:
Hung out with the awesome twitter master Calvin Lee (@mayhemstudios):
Hung around the Austin Hilton pitching all sorts of awesome people, including Micael Yavonditte (@mikeyavo) who hated us – but which is sort of OK since he hates all location based services – including Foursquare:
And so much, much more.. .
Check out the Gauss blog for more.