Conor O’Neill might have just have sparked something off in his post “How to get and Irish David Heinemeier Hansson” which was followed up by equally pragmatic post by Alan O’Rourke in “Encouraging entrepreneurship in Ireland”. In their posts they offer suggestions to foster entrepreneurship for students which is something I feel strongly about.

Conor describes a “just a job” mentality displayed by a majority of students/grads who wanted nothing more than a bank or multi-national job. Unfortunately very little options are open to those students/grads that would love to work in a start-up and develop their careers quite apart from working in large multi-nationals.

In March after attending a ShareIT event organised by Damien Mulley I sent him an email outlining my own thoughts about what could be done to help tech start-ups in Ireland and what some of the current issues were. In two sentences:

Issues: Not enough tech entrepreneurs completing cycles and re-investing within Ireland.
Fixes: “We” ourselves become the angel investors and develop a way of encouraging students in setups similar to Y-Combinator.

Unfortunately, after re-reading the email, nothing I said hasn’t already been mentioned (nearly a year and a half ago). The vital component is the ‘Brain Trust’ as Damien Mulley referred to it. As we’ve seen, despite sitting on millions, Enterprise Ireland can’t give the money away. They’re looking for the big knowledge companies to appear out of a tiny tech-startup eco-system. Damien Mulley had the first post which kicked off this conversation (in Ireland) by highlighting the fact that the traditional VC’s are facing stiffer competition from savy tech entrepreneurs often with not a lot of money, the most famous being Y-Combinator (now Seedcamp in the UK is following a similar model).

James Corbett picked up on Damien Mulleys post and wrote about “Fantasy business teams” which included references to points made by Paul O’Mahony about bloggers and programmers who could “form some sort of loosely bound structure/organisation to facilitate this kind of collaborative enterprise. With enough members we may even be able to boot strap our own ventures through membership fees”.

Personally, I think Conor O’Neills ‘Hothouse’ idea is excellent and he and Alan O’Rourke have obviously given it a bit of thought because I couldn’t add a whole lot more to what they’ve suggested. My contribution would be to echo Paul O’Mahonys point that there is possibly an entrepreneurial opportunity in helping to develop <€100K start-ups in our own community. The 'Hothouse' idea would be a great place to start - we'd be helping to develop the right environment for a start-up culture as well as giving Irish investors additional confidence in these start-ups particularly if they've essentially been peer reviewed and investment from tech entrepreneurs had already been given.

Though Joe Drumgoole might have the last word? “Populations of multi-millions trumps populations of 4 million everytime.”