Serial entrepreneur creates online venue for most ambitious venture

START-UP NATION/Online venue VenueOne:Live-streaming website VenueOne gives its users access to gigs along with interactive online engagements with bands and other users in real time, writes FIONA REDDAN

IT’S HIS THIRD start-up, but for serial entrepreneur Stephen Byrne, VenueOne marks his most ambitious venture yet – to create the world’s first online venue.

Byrne’s start-up ambitions go back more than 20 years to the late 1980s, when he set up Insurance Link, which developed a technology solution to allow insurance firms share information about people who made claims against them. This later became Risk Intelligence Ireland, and Byrne moved onto his second company, MoneyMate, in the early 1990s.

“The big idea was to capture financial data on mutual funds, and then build a front end to enable users of software to analyse performance of investments,” Byrne notes, adding he funded the venture through the low-key sale of Insurance Link – a company he later bought back into.

MoneyMate started with “two people in a bed-sit in Rathmines”, but having secured its first sale of €500 from a local broker, growth soon followed. It has now become an international company where its largest contract last year was worth €1 million, and has annual turnover of about €10 million.

While he ploughs ahead with his new venture, he’s happy to leave his ongoing investment in MoneyMate in the hands of its management.“My ability is in the build phase, getting the idea and making it happen, and then scaling it. Then you need to bring in professional managers to run a very professional business.”

And so to his “biggest, most ambitious idea yet”, which involves creating a social media hub based on live streaming of global events and which already employs 15 people.

“The objective is to build an online global venue that’s no different to the O2 or Madison Square Garden,” says Byrne. “It behaves a little like the 02 arena, in that it will give them access to live gigs and interactive online engagements with bands.”

The website, venueone.com, has been in beta testing since November, and to date has live-streamed a number of gigs, such as Sinead O'Connor performing at the Barretstown Inspirations show at Dublin's Olympia Theatre, as well as the South by SouthWest music festival in Texas.

“Wherever you’re watching it you will be able to watch at the same time as others and chat in real time about what you’re watching,” he notes.

Byrne has adopted a very specific commercial strategy for the site, looking to provide companies with a way of engaging with their target audience that they may not be able to achieve through Twitter or Facebook.

“It’s primarily a business to business model. We provide a complete integrated solution to specific brands,” he says, adding that it “embraces all modern social media platforms”. The plan is to target one strategic partner per territory and develop that. “It will typically be a consumer brand looking to engage with their audience and reward their customers,” notes Byrne. For now, the site is already making money, albeit in small amounts.

“Anytime someone watches content we make revenue from advertising, but it is relatively small amounts of money right now. However, it proves that we are capable of generating that,” he says, adding that without any marketing it has grown to about 10,000 unique visits a month. These users are mostly from Ireland, but it’s also starting to build market share in the UK and US.

This will be important in attracting new money into the business. For now, fundraising is a key focus, as Byrne sets about raising €1 million, a process he describes as “tough”, although he has recently secured commitments from Enterprise Ireland for a “significant” investment.

“It’s not a business model that exists already and that scares people, so we’re more likely to take on private investors that get the vision,” he says, adding he’s already looking to develop relationships with potential round two funders in Silicon Valley.

He should be aided in this task by the heavyweight support he has with him on the venture in the form of experienced venture capitalist Neil O’Leary, of Ion Equity, who has invested in VenueOne in a private capacity. The start-up has considerably bumped up its tech know-how by partnering with Trinity College Dublin to run a project of synchronisation of live video over the internet.

Byrne is bringing the lessons he has learned along the way to his new venture. “When we founded VenueOne we realised that to develop a solution that could truly be a global international business, we had to make decisions at the start that wouldn’t prohibit us from achieving that goal,” he says, noting he was keen not to make a mistake in building something that “didn’t have global scalability”.

For now, there’s no specific exit strategy for VenueOne, but the end goal is to be a significant international player in social media. “Right now it’s all about building the value of the business.”