‘There were some great ideas shared,’ said Shona McManus, co-chair of The Mill, of the latest event on Enterprise Ireland’s tour of the provinces.
Founders and start-ups from the north-east of Ireland gathered at The Mill in Drogheda yesterday (June 5), and offered frank feedback to Enterprise Ireland on the regional and national ecosystem. As ever, there were many ideas shared about what’s working well and what might be improved in supporting start-ups and scale-ups.
Drogheda was the fifth stop on the tour which sees Enterprise Ireland (EI) travel around Ireland to gather input and insights from the start-up community. The aim is to gather the thoughts of those at the coalface, helping to inform the roadmap for its new strategy to support 1,000 new start-ups over the next five years.
To date the tour has stopped in Dublin, Galway, Enniscorthy and Cork and the next stop is Mullingar, followed by Letterkenny, and rounding off in Dublin again with a Stakeholders Listening Session in late June.
At the core of the event was the roundtable consultation, facilitated by David Bowles, managing partner at Yield Labs, but the event kicked off with a panel discussion that saw chair Ann O’Dea and EI’s Conor O’Donovan joined by two local founders.
Drogheda’s Conor O’Boyle is very much a serial founder, involved in a variety of start-ups and businesses, and through Drive Inc, the company he founded with Shane Ennis back in 2019, he has done the full founder journey from being an Enterprise Ireland High Potential Start-up (HPSU) to exit, with the company being acquired by Nasdaq-listed ACV Auctions in 2024.
O’Boyle shared some of his story with the gathering, and pointed to areas that could really benefit new start-ups. He said it was vital to have the likes of Conor O’Donovan in the room hearing the challenges of the start-ups. “It’s invaluable for founders and start-ups to be heard,” he said.
Soothing Solutions’ Sinéad Crowther from Dundalk worked for many years in community pharmacy before making the jump into starting her own business, coming up with an over-the-counter solution for kids with coughs, sore throats and travel sickness, Tonstix. She and her co-founder Denise Lauaki have raised more than €1.5m in funding and built their own production facility, and in 2023 Sinead became the first woman to win HPSU Founder of the Year at the Enterprise Ireland awards. She said that for someone like herself with no business background, taking part in New Frontiers was the big game-changer for her, and indeed its where she met her co-founder.
“Today was a fantastic event here, to engage with all of the Enterprise Ireland clients, the founders here, to feel the energy in the room and to hear the ideas of the founders and how the listening tour has really helped them,” said Ronan Whitty, CEO of The Mill.
O’Donovan, head of entrepreneurship and start-ups, who is leading the tour for Enterprise Ireland, pointed to some of the key themes that arose, such as founders saying they really needed mentors who had started their own business and had sectoral expertise, a theme that has arisen at previous stops on the tour, and he also pointed to feedback on access to investors.
“We know it from other feedback we’ve had, both internationally and in Ireland, about the importance of facilitating greater connection with investors and international investors, with entrepreneurs and Irish founders, helping them to really inject their business and grow with that level of investment and funding,” he said.
“It’s interesting to see the themes that arise again and again,” said Ann O’Dea, CEO of Silicon Republic, which is a partner on the tour. “The need for quick access to someone who will guide aspiring founders right from the ideation stage, the need for sectoral experts when it comes to mentors, and the possibility of creating funding access on the sales and marketing side among them –that and of course a more tax-friendly investment system for small investors.”
Next stop on the Founders Listening Tour is the midlands, hosted by Mullingar’s Irish Manufacturing Research (IMR), followed by a visit to the north-west, and finishing up with a final stakeholder event in Dublin in late June.
The tour can of course only reach a representative sample of start-ups and founders, so EI welcomes feedback from all of the community via the Founders Listening Tour survey here, before the end of June.
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