Life after the bubble – Sunday Tribune – Damien Mulley

30th of January 2007 by admin

Damien Mulley has a great piece in the Sunday Tribune

Quotes from Joe and Conor

Some in the tech industry think this money should be invested differently. Joe Drumgoole from start-up PutPlace believes that the funding, while welcome, doesn’t appear to help smaller start-ups.

“The problem with the EI money is that are no constraints and there is no control over where the money goes, nor is there any hope of it going where it is most needed – into early stage start-ups.”

Drumgoole added: “If you took Euro75m of that Euro175m and started to invest it directly in Irish start-ups, you could fund 50 world-class start-ups each with Euro1.5m of seed capital.”

Conor O’Neill from tech start-up LouderVoice, which helps promote website reviews, thinks the money should be spread out even further than Drumgoole suggests.

“The number of technology businesses being set up by those in their early to mid-20s is worryingly low.

We need some way of encouraging them to have a go without feeling they’ll lose the shirt off their back if it fails. Rather than VCs funding maybe 50 companies at Euro3m-Euro6m each, EI could fund over 800 ventures doing this. Maybe one of those 800 becomes the next YouTube or eBay.”

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One Response to “Life after the bubble – Sunday Tribune – Damien Mulley”

Paul M. Watson

February 1st, 2007 at 6:31 am

Well said. Working in the TSSG I see a lot of EI funding. It pays for my project but there are other ideas out there that are good but can’t get the funding due to bureaucracy.