Anton’s Hat

I’ve just arrived back from the fantastic Paddy’s Valley Tour. What a blast!

Quite frankly anyone who couldn’t go on this really missed out on an amazing, informative, inspiring trip with some of the best and brightest of Irelands Entrepeneurs. Which brings me nicely to the point of this blog.

One of the things that stood out the most for me for our trip was the culture of the Silicon Valley and the way business is done there. The technology community is fragmented here in Ireland and the knowlede base spread quite thinly throughout the country as there is no real forum for people to pass on knowledge acquired and experience gained. Quite a few of the peole and businesses brought together for the Paddy’s Valley trip only got to know each other and share thougths and ideas in California. This begs an obvious question, why did a bunch of irish entrepeneurs have to travel around the world to form a close network and share ideas? Well the truth is that there is no way of doing that in ireland at the moment. But I’ll leave that for now but watch this space…

 The value I gained from the trip was access to the minds of Mike Murphy, business development manager at facebook, Ross Mayfield, the founder of socialtext, Marc Andreesen of Ning, Salim Ismail who runs Yahoo’s Brickhouse (we also had a 30sec hello with Jerry Yang), Seth Sternberg of Meebo and those are just the biggy’s. The host of other contacts made and people we were exposed to would take all day to relate and i’m sure I’ve even left out a billionaire along the way. Notably some of the best and useful contacts were among the Paddy’s Valley group itself.

Track Damien Mulley’s blog for more info as he kept a better track of what was going on. 

I could relate what all these people had to say about their businesses and what their experiences were but it would take too long. I will say this though the most powerful thing I learned about Silicon Valley was not it’s concentration of VCs and Technology companies but how it’s massively open culture affects those groups of people and led to an environment where investors, entrepeneurs and the general community know (or can easily access) information about what is going on in any particular space. A place where respect is gained for having a go, and where knowledge, contacts and info are shared with ease. The attitude is not, “I’ll help you because you’ve already done it” (why would you need it then anyway), it’s more “I’ll help you because you might be the next big thing”, which from a business perspective is a far more intelligent way of looking at the world, especially when you consider the CEO of the hottest company in the web space right now is only 23 (Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook).

So I pose a challenge to the Irish Technology community. Let’s build the same thing here.

Starting Dublin on the 24th-ish January and the third thursday of every month thereafter. Format and location to follow. All ideas and suggestions are welcome.