There wasn’t one big idea… there were scores of nuggets over the course of the evening. People who had been there and done that in online business passed on their insights in an atmosphere that was both relaxed and taut with energy.
Paddy Cosgrave speaking at the Dublin Web Summit
The second Dublin Web Summit put over a dozen internet businessmen (yes, they were all men) in front of some 500 attendees. The format alternated keynote presentations with panel discussions and question-and-answer sessions.
It ran from 3pm to after 10.30 at the swish new Chartered Accountants House on Pearse Street. Some people left towards the end of the evening, but hundreds remained at the post-event session, networking away.
The ideas
Among the ideas and insights that made the event were:
- Hostelworld founder Ray Nolan on the series of companies he has started, hours spent analysing booking pages to make them more usable and the single checkbox that earned a million euros
- Mark Little of Storyful.com on the tidal wave of change we live in, the need to future-proof any business and how engagement and community matter more than shiny pieces of technology
- “The geekiest nerd you can imagine” is how Bill Liao described his younger self – before going on to found 20 companies and float seven of them. He talked about telling your story as an entrepreneur, listening so that the other person feels heard and how Ireland should become “the Delaware of Europe” – a place where it’s quick and easy to start a business
- Paul Hayes, best known for Havok, presented “10 lessons from 10 years selling companies” among them “love conferences, hate stands” and “a meta-party beats a party”. (At big computer games conferences, Havok could not compete with lavish parties thrown by Sony and Microsoft – but they put on a party bus to bring people to and from those parties
There were many more. Among them were Simon Cook of venture capital giant DFJ Esprit, Eamonn Fallon of DAFT, Bebo founder Michael Birch, Shay Garvey of Delta Partners, Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, InCase founder Bobby Chang on creative offline business and Iain Mac Donald, founder of Perlico and now Weedle.
Start-up
Starting digital businesses was at the heart of the event. So there was a particular welcome for three start-ups who pitched to the event. They were competing for the Spark of Genius award of a package of supports for a start-up company. They were:
- CurrencyFair.com – a person-to-person foreign exchange service that cuts banks out of the transaction and reduces costs
- LogEntries.com – which analyses computer server log files in a cloud-based service
- GetItKeepIt.com – a paperless billing service that gives consumers a single online console for managing many household bills
All three were very strong contenders – they were the finalists from a wider competition over recent weeks. In the end GetItKeepIt took the award, announced by sponsoring law firm Maples and Calder.
Founders event
Summit organiser Paddy Cosgrave said the next Dublin Web Summit will be in October. Alongside it, in the background, he is running another event, Founders, that will bring together tech company founders, business leaders and public figures at the level of heads of state.
Maybe the clearest sign of the positive atmosphere was that problems with the sponsored beer caused hardly a murmur of discontent. The bar was woefully slow at the interval, the beer was lukewarm and it ran out before the final networking session.
The summit crowd took it in their stride. The #barfail hashtag got only one or two tweets and the rest of the #summitd Twittering was mainly very positive.
