Interview with Dylan Collins – Jolt Online Gaming
4th of June 2009 by admin
SiliconRepublic have an interview with Dylan Collins from Jolt Online Gaming
Dylan talks about the Jolt deal with Playboy, the funding for his company and the startup scene in Ireland – and early stage seed funding in Ireland
“At 29, Collins is a consummate entrepreneur who began his first business, a mobile software company, while at Trinity College Dublin. His success with DemonWare and the growing reputation of Jolt shows Ireland can develop its own digital industries.
There's no excuse for this country not to be a successful technology start-up hub. Gaming is just one segment and it is becoming cheaper to get a business off the ground.
With Jolt, for example, virtually everything we do is done through the internet cloud using hosting services. All business processes, including analytics, project management and customer support, are in the cloud. You can scale up pretty quickly for very little money if you know what you are doing.
Collins argues passionately about why Ireland needs to be providing greater support for its young technology entrepreneurs. If Ireland wants to achieve this knowledge economy it should be prepared to invest at low seed levels.
If Enterprise Ireland was to make 200 or 300 grants available every year at €50,000 a pop for entrepreneurs to build an online product and go to market. For €50,000 you can get three or four guys in a room for three or four months and they will build a product and go to market. If we had 300 of these groups every year, you would create a digital ecosystem.
In the US, groups like Y Combinator are funding businesses at low levels and, in Europe, The Founders Fund is doing this.
There are venture capitalists in the US waiting to bet on young businesses. It's remarkable this hasn't happened in Ireland yet.
We should be supporting our young right now, instead of scaring them to death.
For €10m a year, you could have 200 companies a year and 5pc of them could emerge Ireland's answer to Microsoft or Nokia, says Collins.”