Before the Collisons, there were Eamonn and Brian Fallon, the brothers behind the Distilled media empire.
They were among the first generation of Irish business personalities to successfully broach the turn-of-the-century internet frontier, transforming a kitchen-table idea into Daft.ie and growing it into a group of businesses valued in the hundreds of millions.
Last week, The Irish Times reported that the brothers secured almost €240 million in cash and shares from the sale of a controlling stake in Distilled to Dublin-based asset manager BlackSheep in 2024.
Recently filed consolidated accounts for the group revealed that the price tag for the deal was €627.4 million, including almost €450 million in cash. The Fallons, who held a combined 38 per cent stake in the group before the deal, and some smaller shareholders received €137.8 million in cash and €177.6 million in shares.
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Okay, it’s not quite Stripe, which was recently valued at $159 billion – but it is a whopping return for a business that began life in 1997 as 15-year-old Brian Fallon’s transition-year mini-company project at St Mary’s College, Rathmines.
[ What happens when a tech billionaire moves to an Irish town?Opens in new window ]
“It was part of a competition run by Dublin City Enterprise Board,” he told The Irish Times in 2006. “I set up Daft, mainly because my sister was moving out and she was finding it really hard to get a place. She’d work till 6pm, and by the time she’d get the Herald and go to view a place it would be already gone.”
There was no plan to continue building the company after the three months leading up to the competition. In the end, the nascent multimillion-euro enterprise made it to the regional finals. A bit like The Beatles being rejected by Decca Records, Fallon didn’t win anything.
However, Brian said “there were hundreds of people using [Daft] by then, lots of landlords and estate agents, and it just seemed like a good idea to keep it running”.
Eamonn, who was studying for a degree in electronic engineering at Trinity College Dublin, came on board in the early days. Yet, the brothers didn’t jump into the promising venture with both feet straight away. Brian went on to study engineering and Eamonn went to Australia.
“When I graduated, and he came back, we decided to give it a go and turn it into a proper commercial venture.”
As boomtime property fever gripped the nation, the website grew dramatically during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“It had quadrupled in size each year, and I had to put in a lot of work to make it survive,” according to Brian.
By the early years of the new century, Daft.ie had “cornered the rental market”, Eamonn said in 2004. “We basically own that space.”
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The idea then was for the site to grow up with its users. “A majority of them, or a big proportion of them, are moving to buy and we’re quickly moving into the first-time buyer market.”
Ireland’s housing bubble was inflating rapidly, and businesses such as Daft.ie and its main rival, MyHome.ie, were fast becoming hot property. The latter company would eventually be bought by The Irish Times Group in 2006, but not before its owners – a consortium that included AIB and estate agents including Sherry Fitzgerald – mulled the prospect of a stock market flotation. It was also suggested that Daft.ie could be sold around this time, but the Fallons denied this.
The media-shy brothers, who have kept a relatively low public profile in the decades since their explosion on to the scene, haven’t been especially prone to public displays of ostentation.
“You can’t be taking out huge salaries from day one,” Eamonn said in a 2004 interview for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards. “You can’t be buying yourselves sports cars and eating expensive dinners. You have to live like you’re a student again – work longer hours than you worked before. It’s not really that nice a thing [being an entrepreneur] unless you’re totally devoted to your business.”
They didn’t have to wait too long to have their devotion rewarded. The Fallons initially became millionaires on the eve of Ireland’s property crash in 2007, when US hedge fund Tiger Global acquired a quarter of Daft for almost €9 million.
Then, in 2015, the brothers ceded another degree of control over the business they had built by partnering with Norwegian group Schibsted. Four years previously, they had restructured their various ventures, including Daft and Adverts.ie, bringing them under the banner of Distilled Media.
The deal with Schibsted merged those businesses with another classifieds platform, DoneDeal.ie, in which the Norwegian group had acquired a majority stake in 2011.
Tiger exited its 25 per cent stake for a reported €21 million. It meant that Distilled was now a 50:50 partnership between the Fallons and Schibsted. It’s not clear how much the merger was worth to the Fallons, but the deal certainly made them multimillionaires, and they shared tens of millions of euro worth of dividends from the combined entity over the years.
Crucially, the brothers have always managed to keep their foot in the door of the group they built and stewarded through Ireland’s boom-bust property cycles.
Following the 2024 deal with BlackSheep, they remain key figures in the Distilled empire, retaining a combined 33.3 per cent of the new structure.
Asked last week whether it has been difficult to slowly reduce their stake in the business over time, Eamonn and Brian told The Irish Times that it has been part of the natural evolution of the group and its growth.
[ Fallon brothers behind Daft.ie secured almost €240m from Distilled saleOpens in new window ]
“At each stage of the business’s development, bringing in the right strategic partner has helped Distilled grow and become a stronger business. We’ve been fortunate in the partners we’ve worked with, and the business is better for each of them.”
Eamonn remains in situ as chief executive, while Brian – who has taken a more hands-on role in recent years at the Journal (formerly TheJournal.ie), the online news platform they set up in 2010 – continues to sit on the board of Distilled.
They remain immersed in the growth of the group, the brothers said last week.
“We love building this business and we’re focused on continuing to grow it over the long term. With the support of our strategic partners, we see plenty of runway ahead, and we’ll keep investing in the platforms and the people behind them.”
