Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

blog.dingadeal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 74 posts

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#11

Post by tomgallard »

rickyconnolly wrote: post #7

As an Irish individual, I can tell you that the author is overlooking one very crucial downside to operating a startup in Ireland. As you may know, our banking sector was decimated in the financial crisis. This has made it extraordinarily difficult for startups to obtain even modest business loans from financial institutions. Remember this is Europe we are talking about, where VC financing is much less common than 'm…

I guess you've got to look on the bright side though. When there's lots of VC money floating around, people feel like they have to raise capital, employee expensive people, get swish offices.

The secret is that you don't! Bootstrap yourself, focus on bringing in customer's money, rather than spending your equity (which is effectively what you're doing when you take funding).

Take this story http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/article/TMG9133619/Spanx-crea... . Sara Blakely has built a billion dollar company, which she owns 100%, without taking a penny of funding and using $5,000 dollar of her savings. And this is a physical product! When you're selling online services/software there should be even less need for it.

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#12

Post by ilcavero »

philjr wrote: post #4

I'd definitely question the talented labour available for work. There's nothing like the talent in SF and we're currently saturated with Google/Facebook/Amazon/LinkedIn/Zynga sucking up a significant chunk of the best talent here and also bringing people from the UK and mainland Europe. This would be a significant challenge for anyone looking to push the bleeding edge of technology. There aren't many brilliant young…

I can tell you that my employers are having such difficulties hiring good engineers here in Dublin that they are opening another shop on east Europe. Might be matter of €€€, I don't know, but the pool of both companies and candidates is quite small here.

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#13

Post by cgarvey »

philjr wrote: post #4

I'd definitely question the talented labour available for work. There's nothing like the talent in SF and we're currently saturated with Google/Facebook/Amazon/LinkedIn/Zynga sucking up a significant chunk of the best talent here and also bringing people from the UK and mainland Europe. This would be a significant challenge for anyone looking to push the bleeding edge of technology. There aren't many brilliant young…

There are talented people everywhere. I know it may be shocking, but some of us/them don't want to live in SF. I do agree though that SF has been successful in breeding a mentality where up and coming professionals should sacrifice themselves beyond what would typically be acceptable. Something to be proud of though? Not so sure...

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#14

Post by Peroni »

From a business perspective, everything the author says makes sense. From a human perspective, as someone who was born & raised in Ireland and subsequently left the country 6 years ago at the age of 24 I can promise you, Ireland is far from a vibrant, positive place to live.

Every single element of the media is drowned in the desperation of the economic crisis, the cost of living is exorbitant and the weather is truly depressing.

The education system is by far Irelands biggest selling point, aside from the fact that it's mostly free, the standard of education and the amount of school leavers undergoing degree courses is continuing to rise mainly because there are no jobs available so the nation is instead looking to educate itself in the hope that when the economy improves they will stand a chance of earning a half decent wage.

I would love to see the tech culture in Ireland experience a revival, we were once the worlds largest exporter of software second only to Japan and our CS Graduates were some of the most sought after candidates on the planet but for those of you considering a move, remember, whilst he timing may be right from a business perspective, the atmosphere and culture is a huge barrier to overcome.

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#15

Post by blainm »

Irish person with a CS background here. I think Ireland has similar problems regarding churning out 'talent' to the UK in that there are initiatives in schools for people to use computers but that's about it.

The fact we have a much smaller population also means that the small percentage of really good hackers you'd normally expect generally is a small number. To compound things further, those in this category are also more likely to immigrate, not because of some hardship, but because there are simply better opportunities elsewhere. To put it bluntly, those who dedicate large amounts of time hacking and getting better are a lot less likely to be 'tied down'.

Universities, yes the number of relevant applicants have gone up, and that's good and all, but to me this looks more reactionary than anything else. I think the primary problem is more of an image one, CS itself remains a mystery subject to many. I realise that this problem may also exist elsewhere, but to me it seems a lot more pronounced here.

I'm glad the government is at least doing something about it, but I feel that simply chucking money at it probably isn't the most effective way to tackle it.

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#16

Post by anamax »

sellably wrote: post #2

Enterprise Ireland just announced their "New Frontiers" scheme which is going to give 15K euro to 100+ startups. It does seem that the government is working hard to support new startups.

Does anyone know how many "Ron Conway years" that is? 15K Euro is much larger than the YC "stipend", but the recent side-investments have eliminated that gap.

Yes, both are outliers, but there's more investment in the long-tail around them.

My point is that 15K euros to 100+ startups sounds big until you look at what the competition is doing.

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#17

Post by hopeless »

Peroni wrote: post #14

From a business perspective, everything the author says makes sense. From a human perspective, as someone who was born & raised in Ireland and subsequently left the country 6 years ago at the age of 24 I can promise you, Ireland is far from a vibrant, positive place to live. Every single element of the media is drowned in the desperation of the economic crisis, the cost of living is exorbitant and the weather is trul…

You can mostly ignore the media if you're in the tech industry because there's basically two economies here: one is fecked and the other is the tech industry, with tons of open positions.

Re. the weather: yeah, it rains. And when it doesn't rain it's often cloudy. And sometimes it's inbetween (a "soft" day). But then the hills, fields and mountains look fantastic (unlike, say much of the UK) because it isn't being burnt to a crisp.

Of far more concern is the poor broadband infrastructure outside of Dublin, particularly in rural areas but even in some cities. It ranges from 25Mbs fibre to no fixed broadband at all in Cork city. Out in the country (i.e., 10miles from a city), it's mostly a choice between mobile (3G), fixed wireless or satellite.

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#18

Post by untog »

philjr wrote: post #4

I'd definitely question the talented labour available for work. There's nothing like the talent in SF and we're currently saturated with Google/Facebook/Amazon/LinkedIn/Zynga sucking up a significant chunk of the best talent here and also bringing people from the UK and mainland Europe. This would be a significant challenge for anyone looking to push the bleeding edge of technology. There aren't many brilliant young…

There's nothing like the talent in SF

There is. Seriously.

Travel outside of the west coast of the US a little- there are a ton of great developers that are either unwilling or unable (e.g. visas) to relocate to SF.

And you sort of disprove your own point- there are no engineers available in SF because the big companies have hired them all. So surely that means that areas outside of SF have more engineers available, because no large companies are taking them?

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#19

Post by [deleted] »

ma2rten wrote: post #10
rickyconnolly wrote: post #7

As an Irish individual, I can tell you that the author is overlooking one very crucial downside to operating a startup in Ireland. As you may know, our banking sector was decimated in the financial crisis. This has made it extraordinarily difficult for startups to obtain even modest business loans from financial institutions. Remember this is Europe we are talking about, where VC financing is much less common than 'm…

I am not sure what type of startup you are talking about, but I think what typically with the term startup is a company, that is small, has a low probability of succeeding, but if it does can grow very fast. I don't think there is (or was) any bank in to world that will loan money to this type of company. But there is no reason, why an Irish startup can not have investors from other places, especially with the financ…

[deleted]

Re: Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up

#20

Post by dkersten »

ilcavero wrote: post #12
philjr wrote: post #4

I'd definitely question the talented labour available for work. There's nothing like the talent in SF and we're currently saturated with Google/Facebook/Amazon/LinkedIn/Zynga sucking up a significant chunk of the best talent here and also bringing people from the UK and mainland Europe. This would be a significant challenge for anyone looking to push the bleeding edge of technology. There aren't many brilliant young…

I can tell you that my employers are having such difficulties hiring good engineers here in Dublin that they are opening another shop on east Europe. Might be matter of €€€, I don't know, but the pool of both companies and candidates is quite small here.

The company pool in Dublin seems large enough to me (relative to the size of the city) when you count the handful of large companies and the many small companies. The pool of (good) candidates is tiny though - I've spoken to a lot of companies at events like PyCon Ireland and the IrishDev conferences a few years back and just word of mouth through less formal events and everyone is looking for employees! Google, Facebook, Amazon, Demonware - they are all hiring and (from talking to people working at them) are having a hard time finding enough people. Then there are lots of small companies that are finding it even harder still to hire (and they can't offer all the perks your Googles and Facebooks can...) - my former employer called me a few times to see would I come back; I get emails and linkedin messages asking if I'm available for work all the time; I get friends sending me messages to see am I available for XYZ.. everyone is having a hard time filling positions. I also don't know if companies just aren't offering enough money, but I get the impression that there just aren't enough good candidates out there.

So, from that, I would say that a startup in Dublin[1] is not a good idea from an availability of talent perspective - there may be talent there, but they're all happily employed.

[1] outside of Dublin, the availability of candidates seems to generally be worse still, though some towns that have schools/ITs/unis but lack of companies (eg Carlow) may have some people who would rather not move to Dublin

Post reply on HN