Copacetic

Walter is worried about my previous posts. I think Ireland is knee deep in Entrepreneurs, but we can’t do a straight import of ideas to make Ireland plc. work in the IT sector. We need to invent our own solutions and try and direct our problem solving capabilities to areas where our brethren in overseas (US, China, Vietnam, India) can’t compete. Numbers games won’t work here so smarter focus at much earlier in the pipeline must rule the day.

I can pitch you a 60 second idea, in fact I have a limitless universe of 60 second ideas. But nobody is investing in your idea after 60 seconds. And I have worse news, nobody is going to invest in you after your pitch at NextWeb, or Essential Web ‘07 or any of the other favourite rites of passage for startups.

What investors are going to invest in is simple,

• Market opportunity: A big and growing market, without strong incumbents, where you’re company has an unfair advantage.
• Great Team: Stupidly off the scale technical brilliance will get you somewhere here, but is that you? Are you as smart as Sergey and Larry. No I didn’t think so, So great team means great engineering guy, great marketing, great sales guy and/or great “did it before” guy. Or some combination of the above.
• Style, Fashion, Vogue: Investors are herd animals, advertising, social networks and media sites are big at the moment. If you’re pitching something else, prepare to queue.

One minute pitches are the entrepreneur equivalent of shitting in a bottle. Very dificult to achieve and one you’ve done it nobody is interested in the results.

Conor talks about bootstrapping startups in Ireland and the idea sounds good at first blush, but this is Ireland, not America or India. When YCombinator gets to pick the best of Stanford or Andy Bechtolsheim gives 100,000 dollars to two guys with an idea  the demographics have already done there work.

Populations of multi-millions trumps populations of 4 million everytime. I hate to burst people’s bubble, but we simply won’t generate as many entrepreneurs in Ireland as India or the USA, and even if we could we don’t have a touchstone tech  centre where you can go and expect to find them.

What can we do? Go back earlier in the supply chain, get this stuff into the schools, and then we have some hope.  Sorry to rain on the parade guys.

I was out for pints last night with Mark Taylor who is Eircom’s new Web 2.0 Evangelist (who knew?). He was asking about events for Web 2.0 geeks in Dublin which got me thinking about Open Coffee.

Anybody on for an Open Coffee event in Dublin? Any suggested venues?

 As my commenters have pointed out Open Coffee is alive and kicking in Dublin  at the Morrison Hotel.  I just missed one today. Serves me right for not googling it first.

Anyway the next one is two weeks away and I’ve just added it to my calendar. Hope to see you there. 

Here is me on  the Redcouch at NextWeb. Memo to self,  push glasses up on nose before doing video interviews.

John Toone CEO of Ireland’s emerging social music network startup,  Muzu.tv, spoke at SXSW about their goals in the coming months. Watch the promo video for a quick understanding of what they do (best to do it with headsphones, there is musical content).

These guys are going to go large…

So Enterprise Ireland doled out 175 million euro to Irish VCs last year on the basis that they would find matching funds and thus inject new vigor into the Irish VC market. Since then, well not much has happened. No Irish VC to date has raised a new fund, and none looks like doing so in the immediate future (please comment if you know different).

So here’s a suggestion, carve out 50m of that fund (or 75m or 20m) and just give it away in chunks of 100k to any Irish startup who meets the following criteria,

• Are in or have completed an Enterprise program, such as the one at the PDC or the M50 program at Tallaght. There are others but these are two I know about
• Meet standard HPSU criteria (will generate employment and export markets)

That’s it. You get a 100k (It can be tranched but that’s more management overhead, better to just chuck it out there) and go and start your business.

Even 50m would mean you could fund 500 startups. How many HPSUs are there?

That would still leave 125m to prepare the ground for those startups once they need to raise serious money from the Irish VC market.

Conor O’Neill leaves a valuable clarification in the comments,

A key requirement is that matching funds are NOT required from the startups

I found a cool holiday tracking program last week http://whosoff.com. Lovely full feature program for tracking holiday allocations and requests for a small company. It has a proper approval system and lots of nice support for things like sick leave and pretty cool reporting tools. Best of all its free (ad supported, but ads are pretty innocuous).

Its a bit twitchy in Firefox (some gifs aren’t laid out properly) but apart from that does exactly what it says on the tin, tells you who’s off today.

John Gallagher - 2004 Smart Homes

Design and install central cabling systems.

Telecommunication and entertainment services.

New developments.

Market leader in Ireland.

Support broadband, telephony, networks, satellite services, multi-media systems.

Volume and large scale projects, quality and attention detail, build a brand, Innovation and R&D.

Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.

Find a grey head to be a mentor.

60+ staff in 2006.

Ivan Coulter - Sigmoid Technologies

Delivering seamless drug solutions. 2006 winners.

Some drugs are water soluble, new drugs are not water soluble but are oil soluble. Convert large capsules into mini capsules to dictate delivery spectrum within the gut.

Crisis in pharma industry. Patents expiring, fewer drugs are emerging.

Drug delivery : solubility, permeability, stability.

8 people.

Huge list of academic collaborations

Developing four products at the moment.

Currently have 2m invested.

Looking to raise 4m.

Dan Phillpott 2006 winner, EnBIO

Enhancing BioMaterials.

Medical device coatings.

Active coatings. Induces a positive biological response for any medical implant (e.g. hip replacement).

Coating applied at room temperature. Therefor can be combined with other agents.

Makes a specific coating piezo electric to encourage healing.

Short story: Patients recover more quickly with less chance of setbacks.

Raised 2m.

Business model, licensing and royalties.

Letters from the trenches (founder of Phive).

ISA - 150 members, indigenous technology businesses, entrepreneurial and export oriented.

The current environment. Irish R&D expenditure 2006 400m, 2007 1bn.

Early stage still gives us the best ROI (2004 numbers).

ISA Survey. 6 entrepreneurs. Current model is not a meritocracy its random. Funding focused on multi-nationals. Commericalisation process varies across institutions. Process convoluted and entrepreneur unfriendly.

No clear roadmap for funding across colleges. Focused on flighty P.hDs.

Change. Aims of government R&D retaining Multi-nationals and training people for multi-nationals. Now commercialisation, startups and spinouts. SFI. Globalisation. New people. Lots of non-nationals.

Behavior. People behave as if we know what we are doing. The situation requires new approaches.

US and Israel prove the startup model.

How do we maximise this opportunity.

Best practice. Israel invested 10bn in VC.  World beating research, Entrepreneurs, route to market consumer or multi-nationals.

Don’t take the technology out of the university to early. Israel focuses very heavily on incubation.

SFI and EI are well aligned on the move from R&D to commercialisation.

Startups are not linear. Map networking activity over the pipeline. Business formation issues are done right at the start in the US.

Best practice is defined by financial success.

Involving major multi-nationals is key.

A business startup is a singularity driven by a series of network events.

Challenges.  Access to UNI R&D is confusing. No list of Irish R&D projects in Universities.

Jockeying for position, EI, SFI, multi-nationals, Universities.

Entrepreneurs in a weak position. Academics have full funding.

Incubator access guarantees funding in Israel.

Funding raising takes too long.

ISA actions. use Expertise Ireland as a common portal. Workshop on best practice for startups. Handbook on funding. Stanford program for CEOs. Working to promote entrepreneurship.

Be-Herd project.

Questions: