Dublin Web Summit - Some Notes And Images From Ireland's Tech Community

Posted by Tom Foremski - October 24, 2012

I met a lot of very impressive Irish entrepreneurs on my recent visit to the Dublin Web Summit. Here's some notes from our conversations (at least the ones I remember, due to a delicious local brew called Guinness :).

Iain MacDonald (above), co-founder of Skillpages, has had a very successful career so far, a $100 million exit for his company Perlico, and is now running one of Ireland's fastest growing companies.

He says that Ireland needs more mid-level financing options in the $20m to $30m range to help startups expand. While there have been many good exits for Irish startups over the past five years, they often have little choice to selling because expansion financing isn't available.

Barry O'Neill (above), at iPad-based children's pop-up book publisher StoryToys, said that Irish startups need to become more ambitious, they should dream bigger. However, if expansion financing isn't available, Ireland is unlikely to be able to produce a large global tech company.

Irish TV showed an interesting advertising campaign by The Irish Times, the largest daily newspaper, with the theme, "The Story of Why?" It highlighted the importance of interpreting facts such as who, what, when and that answering "why" helped create the story. The newspaper also exhibited at the Web Summit (above).