A group of founders and start-ups gathered in TU Dublin on Friday to share their thoughts with Enterprise Ireland on the needs of the ecosystem.
The Founders Listening Tour sees Enterprise Ireland (EI) travel to all the regions in Ireland to gather input and insights from the start-up community, in an initiative it says will inform the roadmap for its new strategy to support 1,000 start-ups in the next five years. It kicked off the tour in TU Dublin on Friday (9 May), where a short panel discussion was followed by a roundtable consultation facilitated by David Bowles, managing partner at Yield Lab.
“The whole idea behind the Founders Listening Tour is to do what it says on the tin,” said Conor O’Donovan, head of start-ups and entrepreneurship at EI. “It’s to go across the country, to listen to founders from all sizes of companies, from all sectors, from all regions, and to really understand what their needs are, how we can help them to start up and to scale their businesses globally.
“This is a really important process in terms of understanding how we can build out the roadmap to support those thousand new start-ups,” he said. “It was really insightful to hear some of their challenges, and to hear the enthusiasm for the opportunities for their businesses going forward. We want to help them and that’s what today is all about.”
After introductions and a free-flowing panel discussion, Bowles kicked off the roundtable consultation which saw the founders discuss challenges, boundaries to success, supports that currently work well and their aspirations as regards what the perfect start-up ecosystem might look like. Now EI will gather this feedback, and the feedback from the regional editions, to help inform its strategy in coming months and years.
“This process is extremely important in order to learn from people actually at the coalface,” said Bowles. “There’s no point in trying to design an ecosystem for supporting start-ups without talking to the people who are actually using it.”
The panel discussion heard from JustTip’s co-founder James Fahy and Alex Harris, co-founder and chief marketing officer at CogniStream, the recent winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at TU Dublin, as well as O’Donovan. They shared their stories on their journeys to date, and their views on where the greatest challenges are, and what supports have worked for them.
As an early-stage start-up founder, Harris was quick to point to where supports might be streamlined in the early days, and she detailed how international events had been crucial for its success to date in onboarding customers. Fahy detailed JustTip’s fundraising journey to date and said that, beyond EI supports, private capital continued to be a challenge in Ireland. He added his voice to those calling for a change in Government policy when it comes to the EIS (Enterprise Investment Scheme) – the Government tax-relief scheme that incentivises private individuals to invest in early-stage businesses – to ensure that it is competitive with comparable schemes in the UK.
Silicon Republic will travel with the EI team around Ireland, documenting the events.“We’re delighted to be partners on the Founders Listening Tour,” said Ann O’Dea, CEO and editor-in-chief at Silicon Republic who emceed and chaired the panel discussion. “We’re impressed to see EI out there listening to the honest and open views of those founders they aim to support.”
Among many of the ideas coming from the group gathered were that of a virtual hub where founders could access area experts, and a one-stop-shop for all the supports available; a talent hub for finding co-founders with commercial or technical skills that might be missing in the founding team; while others suggested a physical building.
“A physical space would be amazing,” said Gavin Beirne, founder of UnPaper, who said it was mooted at his table. “Having somewhere where founders or people already on the start-up journey could come and work in the space, speak to people from EI, speak to other founders, people who are further along on the journey, mentors, advisers, I think that would be brilliant.”
The next stop on the Founders’ Listening Tour is Galway’s PorterShed, followed by visits to the south-west, the midlands, the south-east, north-west and north-east over the coming month or so. While the tour can only reach a representative group of start-ups on the roadshow, O’Donovan emphasised that EI welcomes feedback from all of the community and extended an email address (startupireland@enterprise-ireland.com) for anyone not taking part who has feedback to offer.
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