“THERE IS too much worship of the hero entrepreneur,” a leading American angel investor told attendees at the launch of the Dublin Web Summit this week.
Esther Dyson, who sold her company EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004 and whose subsequent investments included Flickr and Meetup Inc, warned an audience of tech start-ups that “being CEO is not all it’s cut out to be”.
“Every little boy and some little girls, they want to be ‘the CEO’ or ‘the entrepreneur’,” Ms Dyson said. Referring to new US legislation to help entrepreneurs raise money she said, “Dude, who are all these entrepreneurs going to hire? There is going to be no one left.”
Ms Dyson, who has served on several boards that set policy for the web, told a full Trinity College lecture theatre, “Maybe if you start something, you should hire someone else to run it, and then you can continue to be the most wonderful design person or whatever”.
In a discussion moderated by Dublin Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave, WPP Group chairman and former White House deputy chief of staff Philip Lader told attendees it was important to “make new mistakes”.
Asked about the success of Instagram, the photo-uploading company with 12 employees which Facebook has just acquired for $1 billion, Mr Lader said: “We need great cases like that as inspiration, but I would hope that is not the motivation for much of what all of us in this room are doing.”
Encouraging entrepreneurs to temper their expectations, Mr Lader said there was “a tremendous reward and joy in creating a better product or a whole new market” but he said “oftentimes, that’s accompanied by financial reward, but more often, it’s not accompanied by vast financial reward”.
While praising Instagram’s product, Ms Dyson said: “I think there is a bit of a bubble. These guys were really, really lucky. They also had a great product.”
Now in its third year, the Dublin Web Summit will take place in the RDS from October 16th-18th. With previous speakers including the founders of YouTube, Skype, Twitter, LinkedIn and Angry Birds, Paddy Cosgrave said this year’s event would be “the biggest yet”.
“It will have a real international focus as we work to show international start-ups why Dublin is a great place for tech companies.”
Mr Cosgrave will also take over the Nasdaq building in New York on June 15th for his first overseas F.ounders event.
Aimed at tech companies on track to IPO or acquisition, he said: “We’ve got most of the fastest growing start-ups in the world either speaking or attending. These guys will create most of the jobs and most of the new wealth in the tech sector over the next three to four years.”
He said New York could become the permanent home for the F.ounders event started in Dublin in 2010.
Speaking at the launch, Noel Ruane of Dogpatch Labs – the incubator for early-stage companies run by US venture capital fund Polaris – said six of the 18 Dublin incubator companies had raised €1 million each since October. “Four have raised €1 million since October, three of those have announced, another closed last week, one closes this week and there is another closing next week.” He said the companies were in the clean tech, life sciences and content space.
Hiring at the launch event after a party in Café en Seine was Skillpages, the Dublin company that enables people with skills to connect to the people who need them through their social networks.
Skillpages chief executive Iain McDonald, who said his company had just passed the four million-user mark, said he hopes to grow staff numbers from 30 to 50 in the next 12 months. On the lookout for designers and coders, he said they were “hard to find to world class standards”. But he said shortages were not unique to Ireland as academia struggled to keep pace with industry.
Exhibitor Brightwater recruitment noted it had “70 new IT job vacancies every week” with the biggest shortages in Java and .NET development. The Irish Software Developers’ Network also announced the opening of TCube, their Castle Street venue where software professionals can gather for up-skilling events, reducing their cost of venue hire.
