Dublin Web Summit – Top Tips from Top Entrepreneurs!

I attended the Dublin Web Summit in Trinity College last night and wanted to give a short summary of what went on and what the speakers were talking about.

First off, hats off to the event organiser, Paddy Cosgrave. I hadn’t met or heard of Paddy until this event, but judging by his CV he certainly gets about. I think you have to admire someone who is clearly passionate about what they do and are willing to bring others along with them in their quest for understanding. It’s also refreshing to see such genuine openness and honesty in someone like Paddy. So, Paddy is great! Nough said!

Mark Little was moderating the event, hats off to his bravery also in moving from the security of RTE to follow his passion and endeavour to sort the news from the noise.  I also bumped into Dermot Casey who’ll be working with Mark to develop their new start-up , aka the Global News Project.

So, Mark kicked off the summit referring to the fact that we were not there to talk about how bad things were, how bad the economy was or about how we could seek out new ways to position ourselves as leaders in the knowledge economy! Big cheer! No political speak was allowed!

Fred Karlsson from Donedeal gave us a quick walk through how he built his business from zero to hero in a few short years. Started with the goal of wanting to be the biggest classified ads website in Ireland – now wants to be the biggest classified ads website in Ireland – by far!

There was a panel discussion then around building a business and the the challenges involved in that, there was  Fred, Colm Lyon from Realex, Ciaran Bollard from Muzu TV and Dylan Collins. I found the discussion very interesting in the sense that these guys are all very comfortable with the concept of risk.

They all embrace the possibility that if you have an idea, work hard, get some lucky breaks and are 100% focused on what you want to achieve, then maybe, just maybe, your business is going to hit the big time! OK, so it doesn’t always work out that way, but with guys like this, failure is part of success not something separate. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that failure is a necessary  component of success, the more you fail, the more your succeed.

This theme of risk and entrepreneurship was picked up by Chris Horn . Amongst many other things, Chris talked about how there may be a perception in Ireland, that being an entrepreneur was somehow a negative thing. The link between failure and the Irish mentality seems to rest uneasy.

True to say that we don’t go out looking to fail, but if we don’t fail at least some of the time, then we aren’t taking risks, and if we aren’t taking risks, then are aren’t making progress – both individually and collectively.

I meant to ask Chris about the Innovation Task force he is part of. Chris said there were 28 people on this task force – 28 people! I know it’s hard to leave all those important people out (there’s politics getting in the way again!), but  I wonder how much innovation you get with 28 people in a room for 6 hours – that’s about 13 minutes speaking time per person! Anyway, I recommend someone on the task force read The Nine Lives of Innovation – it may help the process?

What I really wanted to talk about in this blog is the panel Q&A we had at the end, with Matt Mullenweg (seriously creative and colourful guy), founder of Wordpress, Craig Newmark (dry wit has found it’s home!), founder of Craigslist, Ben Hammersly (cuts through the crap!) , Wired’s Editor-at-Large and Chris Horn, former Iona CEO.

Mark asked the panel about the future of media, no doubt with one eye on his fledgling enterprise and how could we sort out the real news from all the clutter out there. How were we ever going to manage all the information that is thrown at us every day? I’m paraphrasing now, but from memory Ben’s animated response went something like…

Bullshit! We’re fooling ourselves’ that we actually care about this stuff, or that we ever really cared. OK, so in the past lots of papers were bought, but how many were actually read? Your average punter might read the front page, the back page, a couple of articles inside, page 3 (depending on the newspaper of course ), but did we ever really read the news before the digital age? We are selfish when it comes to the news that we digest, we are only really interested in news that interests us.

So what about all that information overload Ben? Get over it! Unsubscribe! Be selective! There you go Mark – sorted!

Chris added that the value in breaking news has essentially disappeared as there are so many opportunities for ametuer reporters on a news scene to spread the news rapidly through their mobile devices. He saw the value for professional journalists in commentary and analysis and in investigative news.

Matt was then asked if he though the era of blogging was coming to an end, backed up partly by the information Chris gave us from a survey carried out at the recent BT Young Scientist competition.  The survey said that only 34% of young people read blogs and only 8% actually have one.

Matt explained that he hoped that as young people matured that they would increase their capacity to write a sentence that is longer than 140 characters! Brilliant! I fully agree with Matt on this one. How are you ever going to promote yourself seriously, when a career kicks off, by sticking to Twitter or My Space or Facebook one liners?

It was very interesting to hear Matt say that Twitter has become one of the top distribution systems for wordpress blogs in recent times, better than RSS or Google Reader. If you look at Twitter these day, apart from the noise of what I’m doing now, most tweets are linking back to blogs or  articles on websites.

Craig talked about the culture in Silicon Valley, where the ethos allowed people to fail, and fail again, and fail again…, as Matt chipped in, ‘Always make new mistakes’. This was bringing it back to the earlier remarks from Chris that Ireland is not a country that embraces failure for the sake of success.

Mark probed a little more on this question – why do the Irish people have a fear of failure?

Chris, being the honorary Irish man on the panel thought that there was an unhealthy race to the bottom by the focus of government on restoring our national competitiveness and Ben added that focusing relentlessly on  attracting companies by offering low tax rates and other incentives is eventually going to lead to a environment where what you’re actually trying to create is lost – a vibrant society where the culture allows people to take risks and are encouraged to try new things.

By developing this type of society Ireland stands a change of actually attracting the people, not the companies, that will in the longer term,  provide the jobs and culture that is so badly needed to survive  in a true knowledge economy. We will never be able to complete with the likes of India and Russia when it comes to knowledge workers, so why try.

What Ireland can compete on is -  creativity, imagination and creating the environment where the right people are attracted to live in the country.

I’m sure I left many things out, but the summit was very thought provoking.

I really hope that some influential people were in the audience and they were inspired, like Pat was, to actually do something about it and not just talk about how bad things are.

Update:

Forgot to add – Mark asked the panel what are the top tips they would give any aspiring entrepreneurs?

Chris – Don’t do it on your own, get a good partners

Craig – Treat customers like you’d want to be treated yourself

Matt – Learn to code!

Ben – Agreed with Matt (though not necessarily on the code language!), plus he said the secret to doing anything worthwhile is to make it beautiful, the really great stuf is gorgeous.

Were you at the summit – what stood out for you?

What about risk and innovation – does your country embrace failure in the pursuit of success?

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