No the first rule is to be extraordinarily smart ! They did make it in Ireland aged 17 but thru scholarships and offers state side chose to relocate and study there and big ups to them.

Didn’t question that at all Craig, what they did while in Ireland was amazing and more that most Irish start ups ever achieve. And leaving was definitely the smart thing to do, they had taken their talent as far as it could go here. I am completely in awe of them – it’s just been the most wonderful thing to watch their extraordinary progress.

If working hard was a formula for making your own luck, coal miners would be the luckiest people on earth.

Mark,
I agree that there aren’t any hard and fast rules. That title was added by the editors.

Gee Mark way to ruin a good news piece, no yr right but I remember these brothers they were always going to setup in the states. Ireland has no silicon valley style cluster of industry from which startups can leverage their innovation and knowledge transfer. The problem with irish enterprise is there is no focused approach to hard and soft supports with multiagency competition diluting the whole effort. The previous govts innovation policy of the smart economy thru the NDP was fuzzy at best and this govt has no linkages with VCs or educational BICs to make a solid triad of support for opportunistic entrepreneurs.

Firstly Craig, it’s not a good news piece. It’s not a news piece at all. It’s an opinion column. You can tell from the way it says it’s a column. And I happen to disagree with the opinion, and for a specific reason based on a few years working in SMEs and startups. That’s a few years of my life; so why I, or anyone else who’s put in the time, shouldn’t give our opinions on an opinion piece, well any good reason for that escapes me.

Secondly, we need to fund startups. We need to fund them heavily, we need to fund them widely. But they will still fail at a 90% failure rate, and we need to plan for that because that’s the cost of doing business. We need to amend our bankrupcy laws to cope with that, rather than pushing people to invest in them and them keeping a financial gun to their head in the event of the overwhelmingly-likely failure of a startup.

You have to understand that startups are to the IT sector what fundamental basic blue-sky research is to the entire high-tech sector – an unprofitable but deeply necessary activity. It’s where new engineers and programmers and designers get their first breaks. It’s where we get to try new things when building new products. It’s where we get to test new programming languages in the field, it’s where we get to try new products on a fast cycle, it’s where we get to see what the new thing is going to be and everyone else follows on with the stuff that works. Who else will do that? The large companies who do the databases banks rely on, the embedded systems that run the electronic drips in hospitals, or any of the other basic systems that our society _needs_ to _just work_ so that people don’t die or major systems don’t collapse.

But we’re pushing startups as something else, both in this column (albeit implicitly) and in our policy decisions. We’re pushing them as an solution to our current smoking-hole-in-the-ground of an economy. And they just aren’t. They’re what enables that solution but they aren’t that solution themselves.

And it’s not enough to fund them – they work in the US because the bankrupcy laws don’t penalise people who start companies that then fail by banning them from running companies for years afterwards and financially stomping them into the ground. Which is why a few high-profile bankers have sought bankrupcy status in other jurisdictions.

That’s the problem with opinion pieces like this (in my humble opinion). We do need startups; but we don’t want to push them as something they’re not. Fianna Fail did that when they pushed for hundreds of PhD students in the late 1990s when there weren’t enough roles for them for after they got their PhDs – and then, without lecturerships or post-doctoral research positions, they had to choose to either leave academia (and the entire point of getting a PhD is to have a career in academia) or leave the country – both of which meant that the money spent funding their PhDs was wasted, and the time they invested in those PhDs were wasted.

You can’t just pick something that looks good and dump all our money into it just because it looks good. That’s how we got into this mess. We need something better than a first-order solution.

You da man Mark. You da man. Luck more than anything else is the critical factor at the end of the day.

Lots of great startups in Limerick John. Patrick discusses some of the reasons why he didn’t setup in Ireland here http://www.quora.com/Is-Ireland-a-good-place-to-start-a-business Thankfully things have improved recently.

The opinion piece SAYS the first rule is to be smart not me ! Startups ideally need to be funded by private investors not public hard supports Ireland lacks a credible VC network. All of what you say about startups being the place where engineers developers designers test etc etc can and is also done in the backyard, garage or bedroom of these guys. What yr describing is prestartup. As for luck, unbelievable that’s what we should be teaching, it’s all about luck.

Craig, we don’t have a VC network like that of the US because of the bankrupcy laws. And we don’t have the time to change our bankrupcy laws and wait for the VC network to build up; we need to fund startups directly until such time as those things are done.

As to the prestartup/startup distinction, there isn’t really one. I’ve worked in both, and the difference was that one had an office and the other didn’t. Both are used as proving grounds for new programming languages, new work methodologies, new ideas and new people. And both are needed — the IBMs and the banks and the other large companies, they can’t try these things because they have to be risk averse because too much depends on their systems running properly. The startups act as the experimental lab and field testing for new ideas before large companies take them on. That’s a big part of why 90% of them fail.

V interesting about VC and bankruptcy laws link must look into that more. Also the no distinction between per and startup … Curse my entrepreneurship lecturer !!