Copenhagen, Denmark

On my way from Iceland, I stopped in Copenhagen for a couple of days too.

Start Me Up

The world has more articles about start-ups than it needs. The main news in any article is usually the recently secured funding and the rest of the article comprises of -

• the name of the start-up, which must have an ‘x’ instead of an ‘ex’, a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s'. A ‘kart’ or a ‘cloud’ thrown in there makes you fit better with the rest of the crowd,
• a picture of the young 20-something founders, usually all men, which might be causation and not just correlation,
• the eminent colleges they graduated from, usually engineering colleges, which might be a deeper level of causation to the previous proposed causation,
• the lucrative job offers some of them turned down or left

Willfully ignoring the insipidness of the start-up’s idea, and ignoring the inner voice, which is hopefully still there, that keeps telling them to write about something more interesting or relevant, the journalists often opt to add some human interest to this story and squeeze in a few quotes from the founders. When that age group is given a platform to sell something unambitious, it makes for very Brendan-Rogers-press conference-after-every-defeat sort of talk.