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Startups and Ireland

by Joe Drumgoole on Jul 25, 2009

1,610 views

An overview of the current economic climate in Ireland and why startups are probably our best hope. An outline of where we want to be in 5 years time and some goals along the way.

An overview of the current economic climate in Ireland and why startups are probably our best hope. An outline of where we want to be in 5 years time and some goals along the way.

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I’ve been building software for sale for 25 years. The first company I ever worked for was a startup, I’m currently on my third startup and have been the sole founder of PutPlace.com and CloudSplit.com.
What is the state of the ICT and startup sector. Where is tech going?
What would we like to see happen in the future? Whats wrong with where we are today?
What might we change with how we and the people who fund us run startups.
2001, everything stopped. Everyone went home. Everyone got laid off. ENBA, Ebeon blew up. All the crazy valuations stopped.
Two software startups in ireland. Glockenspiel and Generics. No jobs. Software engineers left en mass for Philips in Holland and Siemens in Germany. The rest went to London.Condoms had only become available over the shelf the year before. My entry level graduates salary was paying a tax rate of 60 pence in the pound for a substantial portion of it.
Yes things are pretty bad but there are still over 250 open slots in the IT section of Irishjobs.ie. People are cheap but they are just as smart as ever.
The startup community is booming and it utilising social networking as a huge amplifier.
8 out of 10 companies fail.Its a lingering death.A year three failure really hurts. Think of your worst hangover, combined with your worst breakup and imagine it happening during a plane crash.It happens, its a rite of passage.Most entrepreneurs only make money on their third startup.
Generics – Too many productsSilverPlatter – Ignored GAAP accountingCape Clear – Good product management fixes all illsPutPlace – We want the product to be perfectInventing new ways to fail is the by product of being an enterpreneur
Security is not and getting hotter.Its broken out of its pencillin ring and now lives inside your social networks.Cross sight scripting has everyone freaking out.SQL injection cost Oracle customers at least 0.5bn in lost time in 2005Starting a company is easy. Finishing one is hard.No corporation tax for three years.40% cash return on R&D spend.Seed Capital Grants for founders.BES relief for investors.
Do the initial spade work on someone elses dime. Basic research can be done as a background task. Key questions.Market size? Big right? At least 1bn dollars a year and growing.Price point? How will you find your customers?Join an incubator.Find a complementary founder.Are you a CEO?
Year 1 is the lost year for most startups. First of all you must have rocks in your head the size of gibraltar if you haven’t joined one of the EPP incubators that have sprung up all over the country.Even still a lot of that first year can be spent naval gazing.Its so cool to be a CEO, you attend lots of training and events.Fix this now.Your job is to take features out until you have a laser focussed product that does exactly what a niche of customers want.Don’t recruit customers by feature request.
Who is he.How can you get him to sign on the line that is dotted.Will he evangelise your product, be a reference.Can you actually get him to part with cash.The Cape Clear story of not asking for the money.The distance between now and your first paying customer is a key metric in your success as a business.Don’t linger in pre-revenue limbo forever.Ahem, you do have a paying model? Advertising plays are dead.
What does success look like? Well 100 companies exiting each year at a 10m valuation each year on the back of a capital utilization of no more than 2m would be pretty good.EI is heavily slanted towards the 10 at 100m. Why, I don’t know? You don’t build a pyramid top down and you might as well try and make a semi-conductor plant out of a sandpit as throw EI sized chunks of money at any Irish business and expect it to grow into a 100m exit. Even if you did most of the capital ends up in the hands of overseas VCs as no Irish VC has the stake money to play at the 5-10m per round blackjack table.
CORD stands for Conversion of R&D.
CORD stands for Conversion of R&D.
CORD stands for Conversion of R&D.

Startups and Ireland — Presentation Transcript

Startups in Ireland,Where do we go from Here?
Joe Drumgoole
http://twitter.com/jdrumgoole
Why Me?
Where are we?
Where do we want to go?
How do we get there?
Who remembers dotbomb?
Who remembers 1986?
Right Here, Right Now
The Bad News
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Chapter 1, first line
The Good News
Starting
The Lost Year
Your First Paying Customer
Where do we want to go?
100 x 10mnot10 x 100m
70 < 300 < 1000
How do we get there?
More CORD
Shorter Incubators
“We want companies that will do better with us, not companies that will fail without us”Paul Graham, Y-Combinator
100k
The world is not endingIts harder than it looksMore startups will help
It’s up to You
Q&A