At the High Potential Start-Up Showcase, Class of 2010 which took place at East Point in Dublin, we had the opportunity of speaking with Hugh Cooney, Chairman of the Board of Enterprise Ireland.
He spoke about the fact that there has always been entrepreneurs in Ireland and how we are moving away from the culture of property speculation.
Interesting to hear that EI have supported 700 companies over the last 10 years – that is impressive, it would be interesting to see the metrics on this ivestment in terms of ROI, status of these 700 companies now – how many have scaled to $100M to $1B companies? Would it have been better to focus on fewer and put more money into the hot companies? I disagree that we should try to keep all our entrepreneurs in Ireland as in order to be successful they may need to be in Silicon Valley or other hot markets.. For example – Its good that Mark Zuckerberg decided to leave Boston for Silicon Valley!!
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