Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up
blog.dingadeal.com
blog.dingadeal.com
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. 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.
So true! Its a great time to be in tech here right now and a terrible time to be in anything else.
Not that much - according to Wikipedia Dublin gets about 695mm of rain a year, from a Scottish perspective that's practically a desert ;-)
And in general terms, Ireland has less extreme weather than the England: it's typically warmer and with less ice/snow in the winter but not as hot in the summer.
It depends if you're measuring quantity of "it rains" in mm of rainfall per year, or percentage of wet time per year.
Some places are very wet by the first metric, but mostly dry by the second. I haven't spent a lot of time in Ireland, but it seemed to be the other way around.
I see your "media desperation" and raise you 11 years of war and government stoked fears of terrorism.
I'm part of the Irish Diaspora, two generations removed. The Emerald Isle has been calling to me lately.
It's not that bad in my opinion. We have a mild climate. Looking on the bright side we don't get heavy snowfall or droughts or heat waves. Personally I like the lack of extremes.
On an anecdotal note most of the CS graduates that I know are not in Ireland any more but are split evenly between the UK and Australia. Also, Dublin is obscenely expensive in my experience.
Have you visited Ireland recently? Next time you're in Dublin, give me a shout, I'll be happy to show you what's been happening since you left.
- 12.5% corporate tax rate. Also if you are big enough to afford good tax advice, e.g. Google or Microsoft you can bounce your revenue from Ireland to the Netherlands and into the Caribbean tax-free islands - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...
- Young, native English-speaking workforce. For historical reasons we don't generally speak our native tongue at all. We've a high birth rate, so our population demographic is quite young compared to other developed western nations.
If a multinational (or startup) is looking to expand into the EU, Ireland would be a good bet for a place to open an office for these reasons. The city I live in (Cork) is just an hour flight from London, and it costs €30 ($40) return including taxes and charges on Ryanair. That's cheaper than a train from Cork to Dublin, our two biggest cities. So Europe is highly accessible, and you can freely travel within the EU without customs hassle.
But there is no reason, why an Irish startup can not have investors from other places, especially with the finance capital of Europe (London) so close by.
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.
JobBridge has been roundly derided as a source of cheap/free labour for less than scrupulous restaurants , shops etc. under the guise of internship (as well as a useful way to fudge unemployment figures); "Learn to deal with problem customers..."
The short of it is, you'll need to offer a fair incentive to get good people - the IT sector is still pretty healthy here and decent graduates can expect to walk into a job from third-level.
1. Bay area 2. New York City
And I would love to see the best start-up founder try his hand in Sudan, Russia or North Korea.
Good things about Ireland. It is beautiful when it is not cloudy.
The people here are very easy to talk to if you want to have a bit of a chat.
If you want to go visit Europe, flights are cheap.
Bad things Expensive, especially electronics and food. I believe the rent's dropped since the economic crisis but that was pretty expensive too.
There isn't much to do besides drink. Food is terrible. I heard it's gotten better but if you've lived in SF or LA and you love food, don't work in Ireland. There were a nice row of Chinese places on Parnell that were pretty good though.
Customer service is shite.
It rains a lot, which isn't too bad since most of the time it's a light drizzle but then it's always cloudy. The worst part though is the winds that usually comes with the heavy rain as it makes it difficult to carry an umbrella since they'd just break.
Banks open from 10-4 with an hour lunch break during that time (where they'd completely close down) and on some days they'd open half an hour later for "training." When I was there none of the banks were open weekends, with a new bank that was opening up advertising, "OPEN ON SAT" as a benefit of their bank. I didn't have a car and my work was too far from a bank so it was a pain to do any kind of banking that required me to head down there.
This makes it sound like I had a rough time in Dublin, honestly it was pretty fun and enjoyable for the most part. All the bad points are pretty minor but having to deal with it day in day out was not fun.
I'd like to dispute this, there are some excellent fine restaurants in Dublin. They may be harder to find against the high background noise of fast food joints, but the same is true for all north American cities too.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=mcdonalds+san+francisco,+ca...
This is not a large number of McDonalds for a city this size. Most of the establishments are singular or small, local chains (such as Philz Coffee).
Start-up incubators - Every major city in the US has them, most of them are terrible. The things that I believe make an incubator good are mainly the talented people willing to spend their time with entrepreneurs and the connections which help close future rounds. Simply having incubators isn't a reason to call Ireland a great place to start a startup.
Talented labour available for work - Every major city in the US has labor available. Not paying for an education does not make someone more qualified. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/22/countries-with-the-...
According to this article, only 32.2% of Irish citizens are college educated, compared with over 40% in the US and 44% of SF residents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
Access to successful entrepreneurs - Ireland may be small, but so is the Valley and so is Boston, and so is DC etc. As long as you start meeting the right people and are smart and have a good idea, doors open. It may be true that the Irish community helps you, but I don't think this makes this "the best place in the world to start a start-up"
State run organizations dedicated to helping your business - In almost every case state run organizations do not help your business.
Community of likeminded individuals - These communities exist in every city in the US. Start-up communities are full of likeminded individuals.
EDIT: The guy that wrote the post seems to have a good idea for a start-up. There is definitely demand from mid size business in that are.
That's not surprising given Ireland's demographics and history but a lot has changed over the years. If you look at 25-34yr olds, for example, Ireland is higher than the US at 43.9%. It's also had the highest level of graduates in Higher education per population in the European Union a few times in the last decade (2003 for example). Unfortunately a lot of graduates are now leaving the country, mostly for the US, Canada and Australia.
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 20 or 30 somethings willing to work in a startup environment sacrificing pay for equity in the same way as there is in SF.
Honestly, I'd see available talent as a significant struggle depending on how you're scaling and what kind of people you would need.
[1] http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/26155-ireland...
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
It still seems rare though and I too wonder how difficult it needs to become before this becomes more accepted.
At the same time, I think more companies also need to embrace remote workers. A lot of the best tech startups that I'm familiar with, both in Ireland and abroad, have a healthy mix of local and remote talent.
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?
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.
Startup Bootcamp on the other hand also gives you ~15K and seems to be modeled on YC - you can do what you want with the money, they provide mentorship with a large network of entrepreneurs and investors, they have a demo day where you pitch in front of investors etc.
Maybe I'm a little outdated on my information on EI however.
1. Do you embrace failure and those who fail? And are there local investors who think this way?
2. Can nerds bump into each other in a random manner in a central location on a regular basis?
3. Are nerds willing to travel there? So is a nerd from Scotland or Turkey thinking "I have to get to Ireland"
I'm not sure that Ireland has those three things yet. Although to be honest I'm in NYC and I'm not sure we have that yet either (or have it 100%).
1. Actually, Ireland isn't too bad for this. You're much much more likely to head "at least you tried" than anything else.
2. No. The tech community is tiny, though so is Dublin. But no, there are few meetups, and they're poorly attended. A well attended meetup might be 30 people, but that's rare. There are more conferences starting, and some cool ones too, like FunConf and the Dublin Web Summit, which can hold their own with the sort of thing you get in SV. But they are rare - there might be 5 worth going to a year.
3. Yes. There is a bit of a migration to Ireland for tech. That said, nerd are more likely to go to Berlin or London, and probably even Paris. So, maybe.
I don't know the NY tech scene, but I would estimate the Irish tech scene to be maybe 1% of the size of what I see in the valley.
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.
1. Start-up Incubators - There are more in the US, that are on average, of higher quality. The incubator we went to was good, but still doesn't compare to YCombinator, TechStars or DreamIt in terms of mentorship and networks.
2. Talent - It's harder to find GOOD python and ruby developers in Dublin than say New York or Boston. Scores of average developers exist, but if you're hunting for extremely good coders, you will have a hard time.
3. Access to successful entrepreneurs - This is the one that annoys me most. Yes - Ireland is a small place. Networking can be done in a matter of weeks and you'll have hit the entire country's tech guys. However, the truth is there were only about 10 founders that really made money during the last tech bubble - the rest largely lost more than they made in the housing crash. That being said, older entrepreneurs may be helpful, but both the successful and now-bankrupt are often starting businesses of their own again. The article is misleading on this point.
4. State run organizations that help - This is true and they are largely referring to Enterprise Ireland. However, what they won't say is that the state money is contingent on the seed funds/angels investing first - they simply match. Raising money in Ireland takes 3x the effort, and 4x as long as it would in London, New York, Toronto, and especially compared with Boston and the valley. The major problem is that these investors are extremely risk-averse. I feel they want to get in on companies series B kind of stability, but at seed level prices. That being said, they are also more interested in better mousetraps than potentially disruptive ideas, in my opinion.
5. Community of like-minded individuals - The people are fine.
1. Yes, I agree that it is not near as strong as the bay area, but with the likes of Startup Bootcamp, things are improving on this front.
2. The Python and Ruby Ireland user groups are probably the two most popular programming language user groups in Ireland. While that doesn't mean that they are good, it certainly raises the odds over people who don't attend user groups simply because it shows they are enthusiastic and wish to learn more. Doesn't say anything about overall numbers, however.
3. I disagree - I attended Startup Weekend Dublin the weekend before last and the startup scene (including successful entrepreneurs) is quite vibrant and alive in Dublin - and growing. Personally I was amazed that my group found not only mentors who knew the industry of our project very well, but also potential customers at the event itself and that through a small bit of emailing we got a phone call with another industry leader.
4. Outside of say Startup Bootcamp, I certainly agree with this point.
5. See my comments on Python/Ruby Ireland and Startup Weekend Dublin - I find the community of like-minded indivitduals to be quite vibrant and growing every day (when I started attending Python Ireland, an average meetup might have 4 or 5 attendees and I did not know anyone in the startup scene - now meetups have 30+ attendees and the conferences sell out and I know tons of people in the startup scene, including other hopeful entrepreneurs like myself, successful entrepreneurs, investors.. etc)
Can't you find great C++ or Java or C# developers and turn then into ruby/python developers though? My impression of the tech scene in the UK and Ireland is that a lot of highly skilled software engineers are either in the banking, industrial or games sectors. I'd expect CVs in the talent pool to skew towards those languages rather than web languages.
As well as hosting some of Europe’s top accelerator programs, Ireland has a high rate of seed and venture capital availability.
Ireland’s population is young, highly innovative, well-educated and multi-lingual.
Strategically located with easy access to the important markets in Europe, US and the middle east. Ireland is the only English speaking country in the Euro-zone.
Ireland is a great place to live and work. download the reasons why http://mammothdigital.tv/clients/enterpriseireland/startinir...
or check out www.startinireland.com
The tech scene there is tiny, and is completely dwarfed by Silicon Valley. That's changing sure, but it has a long long long way to go before it could be considered "the best place in the world".
It does have cheap talent going for it. But it has basically zero VC (look at where Irish companies go to raise, it's not Ireland).
I would say, at best, Ireland can now be considered a "not bad" place to do a startup, but suggesting its the best is lunacy, it's not even the best in Europe (hint: probably Berlin).
[1] Assuming you're good.
Also, don't wait until you graduate to attend these - start as soon as you possibly can. Its never too early to network and you may well save yourself some false starts.