Copacetic

A firm candidate for the the Darwin Awards climbed over two fences and worked her way through dense foliage in order to stick her hand through a link fence into the Amur Tiger enclosure at Dublin zoo. The tiger then did what Tiger’s do and tried to eat her.

The 16 year old girl somehow escaped the Tiger’s clutches and is in a stable condition in hospital.

Despite being on one of the most polluted streets on Dublin, O’Neills Pub continues to put on a amazing flower display each year.
More photos in the flickr set.

Chilling Map of Road Deaths in Ireland in 2006.

IrishEyes has this great set of rules for startups courtesy of Kleiner Perkins, I’ve been meaning to link this for a while, apologies for the delay folks.

Richard Rodger is making a sweet offer on his blog. Download his software (it does CSV amd XML file mangling), blog about it and get a free license.

He says,

You can write whatever you like. Tear us to shreds or sing our praises. It’s all good. We just want links

Go on, you know you want to…

For all you good people out there (you know who you are) who use this hack to create a daily posting of your del.icio.us links, stop it, please stop it!

If I want to see your del.icio.us links I’ll subscribe to your del.icio.us RSS feed or add you to my network.

Brian Caulfield of Trinity Venture Capital visited the HotHouse Program today to do a two hour presentation on Investor Documentation. The subtitle of the talk was From Term Sheets to Sale and Purchase Agreements and everything in Between. Brian was a co-founder of two succesful Irish software companies Exceptis and Similiarity Systems.
He kindly provided a copy of the slides after the talk, but the slides don’t communicate the wealth of personal knowledge Brian has in this area. He made a number of key points that stayed with me,

• Don’t obsess about the percentage of the company you will retain after investment. Instead focus on the “cash waterfall”, e.g. what is likely to be left after the preferences pile has been discharged and any interest or other exit options have been exercised. He worked through three examples of investment and three exit scenarios where the share spilt on investment and exit was radically different.
• People confuse good leaver/bad leaver. If you leave the company as a founder and the VC doens’t want you to go, that that is considered a bad leaver e.g. you leaving will impact the valuation of the company. If you leave the company and the VC can’t wait to see the back of you, then that is a good leaver. Bad leaver is likely to feel the full weight of any penalties because of their impact on company valuation, good leaver is likely to get a pretty reasonable goodbye package just to get him out the door.
• A Well Thumbed bible is a problem. If you are spending a lot of time consulting the investor documentation then you are probably in trouble. These documents are not instruments that should be used to run a company.
• Multiple Exit prefs and ratchets are less common. The penal terms circa 2001 are less common this days. Exit multiples proved to be a complete turn off to subsequent investors and ratchets encourage very short term thinking.

An excellent talk all round for anybody starting a company who is planning to raise VC money.

Enterprise Ireland has just circulated copies of the presentations made at the recent Web 2.0 conference at DCU.I’ve taken the liberty of converting these to HTML and providing them here.

• Judy Gibbons, Accel Partners,

• Web 2.0, The Virtuous Circle

• Digital Lifestyle Aggregators (Mark’s talk didn’t really have a title)

• Web 2.0, Key Factors for Success

• Web 2.0, The Investors Perspective

• Web 2.0, The Exits

In addition to the speakers the following Irish companies made presentations regarding their businesses.

• Sxoop - PXN8
• Infacta - A Technology Marketing Company
• Herbert Street Technologies - Encryption Technology for Business
• InnerWorkings - Briefing to Web 2.0 Ireland Conference
• Alatto - Mobile Search
• Tablane - Your Internet Research Tool
• Nooked -RSS Marketing Made Simple

Apologies if I got the ordering of the Irish companies wrong, but I an working from memory.

If any of the original authors would prefer not to have their content hosted here, drop me a line and I’ll remove it.

(Apologies for the weird indentation, wordpress voimits all over nested lists)

The Irish Computer Society: Open to all but I would expect the onerous joining requirements (and complicated math:-)) to limit membership somewhat. It appears to lean towards academics given its emphasis on third level qualifications. You can join as an individual (well affiliate member) it will cost you €130 and for that you get subscriptions to a few magazines (ComputerScope is the only one I recognised) and a free ICS email account. They also offer a reasonable number of discounts which can add up. You get add some initials after your name (AMICS, MICS, FICS).

The Irish Internet Association: This is a business assocation for Internet businesses based in Ireland. Its focused on companies. Entry level costs are €220 and for this you get to participate in the activities of the IIA.  Other benefits are loosely described on about us page but no details are supplied. You get a listing in their journal and on their members page but given this is a search page this is a dubious benefit (if I know the company name, why wouldn’t I just visit the company website directly?).

The Irish Software Association: The ISA is an employers association and is actually heavily affiliated with IBEC. They don’t post costs for joining on their website (how coy!) but the price for startups is €400. Prices do rise on the basis of the number of employees in the company. Key benefits are access to employer HR data, surveys and the like.
So if you are an individual in the IT world and would like to join a society the ICS is probably your best bet. If you sell stuff over the Internet or are an ISP then the IIA is what I would go for. If you employ people in the IT sector then the ISA is the one for you.

I see the Google Map for Dublin now has the port tunnel clearly marked. Anybody who tries that route is in for a rough trip, its not open for another 3 (or six or nine depending upon who you talk to) months.