Paddy Cosgrave says he lured big tech names to his web summits by ‘just talking to them’

THAT THERE’S a web summit in Dublin at all is a bit of a fluke if you ask its founder, 27-year-old Paddy Cosgrave.

Dressed in jeans and a jumper with a bicycle helmet in tow, and getting up at intervals to make sure his bike is still locked outside on Nassau Street, you could easily mistake him for an undergraduate of nearby Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated from five years ago.

While this week’s Dublin Web Summit sees the founders of internet juggernauts Skype, Bebo and Angry Birds fly halfway across the world at Cosgrave’s behest, this son of a Wicklow farmer says his first web summit in 2009 came about by accident, almost as an exercise in damage limitation.

Co-founding a company called MiCandidate in 2009, a database that aggregates the profiles of political candidates for syndication to the media, Cosgrave had persuaded potential clients from “big media companies around Europe like Sky and the Telegraph” to come to Dublin for a look-see. But when Cosgrave exited MiCandidate after a management buyout with four weeks to go to the event, he was in a bind.

“All these guys were coming over so I was like, f**k, I’d better do something.” He managed to turn the visit into a conference and even bagged then minister for communications Éamon Ryan to speak at it, though he admits the first of what was to become a line of seven summits “didn’t actually go so well”.

“A minister’s willingness to show up at an event is not indicative of its quality,” he quips.

Undeterred and spurred on by the lack of opportunities for budding tech entrepreneurs to network, the idea for a regular event took root. “There were events organised in Ireland constantly with speakers that would include the country managers of tech companies – I mean they are not entrepreneurs. They’ve never set up a company in their lives,” he says.

“I kind of felt there was a need to bring in entrepreneurs.”

Cosgrave’s ability to persuade increasingly impressive tech giants to jet in and speak at subsequent summits must leave the IDA scratching their heads.

“It’s just by kind of talking to them really,” he says of nights spent in the attic room of his house share: “Skyping from about 10pm until midnight, persuading guys to come to Dublin.”

Of his coup in scoring Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to speak at the F.ounders event that ran parallel to the October 2010 summit, an event christened “Davos for geeks”, he says: “I just mailed him and talked to him.”

Of bagging Marcus Segal, the chief operating officer of gaming company Zynga for the June 2011 summit, he says: “I met Marcus in a night club in San Francisco.”

“I don’t know, I think entrepreneurs just like talking to other entrepreneurs and techie entrepreneurs, a lot of them haven’t been around very long and they remember when they were penniless and just had an idea and lots of ambition.”

Though graduating with a business degree, it’s with this “techie entrepreneur” community Cosgrave most identifies, seeing its creativity as far more noble than the pursuit of making money for money’s sake.

With a father who “milked cows by day and then was completely obsessed with computers” it’s little wonder the tech bug bit this eldest of three children.

Referring to what he’s heard about the new biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs and the people who took over when Jobs was forced out of the company in the mid-1980s, he says: “They were driven by two things – to make money for Apple and to make money for themselves.”

Tech entrepreneurs by contrast, he says, are more interested in an idea. “If you hang around with most of the tech entrepreneurs, you realise they don’t drive fancy cars, they don’t have fancy clothes and they don’t know if they have any money. It’s almost irrelevant whether they have any money or not, they are just into creating stuff. It’s the process they are addicted to, not the money.”

As well as running the web summit, Cosgrave continues to run the Undergraduate Awards which he co-founded in 2008, and which recognises the top students on the island of Ireland. But Cosgrave is tight-lipped about his latest tech venture.

“It will make sense when it’s launched,” he says.

With Cosgrave being the oldest person working on the web summit where the average age of his fellow organisers is “24 or 25”, do our State agencies over-complicate the task of attracting tech giants here?

“What the IDA has done so well for so many decades is that they get on planes, they put their finest suits on and they go and meet people who also wear suits and they are 40, 50 and 60 years of age and they are the heads of big global companies,” says Cosgrave.

“But the age profile of the next wave of companies has changed dramatically. There’s also a new kind of very casual culture that has emerged and I think it’s quite difficult for any inward investment agency to change in that regard.”

Citing Denmark and the UK as examples of countries that have hired “a group of very young guys to meet and interact with a lot of these founders”, he says it’s up to the IDA to follow suit.

On a more personal note, Cosgrave refers to his girlfriend during the interview as “a farmer’s daughter”. But he refrains from boasting of his fellow Trinity graduate Faye Dinsmore’s other credentials as an IMG model who has featured in campaigns for L’Oreal and chocolate bar Galaxy.

With 255,000 fans, Dinsmore is the most popular Irish person on Facebook. With her own blog about what models get up to behind the scenes and as a guest blogger for MTV, Cosgrave and Dinsmore are surely Ireland’s premier tech power couple.

So with standing room only at this week’s €495-a-seat web summit, will it make him a profit?

“I hope it does,” he says coyly.

And with plans to drop from three events a year to just one next October, does he see himself associated with the summit for the long haul? “Conferences are maybe like nightclubs,” he says. “They have their time and they blow hot for three or maybe four years . . . but who knows. Coppers is still going,” he jokes.

“I’m sure there will be a smarter, nicer, more charming, more capable 23-year-old who will come along with a better conference and that will be it.”