Copacetic

Chilling Map of Road Deaths in Ireland in 2006.

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.

Here’s a few snaps from the night before.

Tim responds elegantly and cogently to the Web 2.0 trademark controversy. However he compares the use of Web 2.0 with trademarks for Apache and Linux.

Spot the difference Tim, I can run an Apache conference or a Linux conference safe in the knowledge that neither organisation will come gunning for me. They distinguish their conference marks (Apachecon, LinuxWorld) from their web memes (Apache, Linux) , and rightly so.

O’Reilly has retreated from their Cease and Desist Stance. Hooray for IT@Cork.

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)

MySpace completely blows away Bebo on Google Trends for the world.

Then look at Ireland and the trend is completely reversed.

Anybody know why bebo specifically has taken off in Ireland?

You know your doing something right when the Government feels compelled to respond writing.

Sorry Sarah, fixed the link, thanks for the tip Jarek.

I run a small startup called Secantus. We are running on a tight budget and are currently focussed on development. I recently inquired as to the price of joining the Irish Software Association. Get this, the special deal startup price for companies like mine is €800!

To put it in perspective, my subversion hosting, and a dedicated hosted server costs about the same price. The loose rule of thumb is you can get a Web 2.0 company started for around $100,000. €800 is about $1000 at todays prices so I’m going to blow 1% of my share capital on membership of a local club.

The HotHouse incubator program in Dublin stamps out ten to fifteen new startups every six months, a significant proportion of which are Software companies. I don’t know of any that have joined the ISA. If the ISA truely wants to represent the Irish Software community then they are going to have to make a bigger effort to include the startups.

Is there even an appetite to recruit this kind of member in the ISA? You would think in this Web 2.0 world they would have a click here to join button on the website with a credit card form and integrated wiki, email and forums. But no its a very sedate email and inquiry form (no mailto: links for these guys, you’ll cut and paste the address like we did in the old days) an once you get access, rest assured its no Alice and Wonderland website in the members area.

So what could they do,

• Drop the fees to something that doesn’t make me sweat, think less than €100
• Take credit card bookings directly on the site
• Add wiki, forums, mail groups, blogs and company editable web pages to this site. All this technology is freeable available and can even be purchased for next to nothing as a hosted option.
• Target the startup companies, these companies are the future of the industry. Where was the ISA are the recent Enterprise Ireland Web 2.0 event? Will they be at the next one in Cork?

If they did this I’d join, what about you?