And let’s go for another analysis of DCU’s conferences!
This time this was “Get Started”, a conference aimed at explaining the role and the issues linked to an entrepreneur and a startup. We had the chance to have 8 speakers, who were in majority entrepreneurs but also linked to the startups.
Like the previous conferences, it has taken place at the Helix in DCU. And as always I will let you discover this conference as if you have been there for real ! Most of the speakers as I already said are or have been entrepreneurs. So the different speeches were for most of them about their personal experience and so their personal life. Most of the students found it boring, while a little part has been interested. In my opinion that was less exciting than the previous conferences because I prefer to hear about general cases and different theories than personal life. But it was still interesting because it made me able to understand how to have the same result (making his own business) by thinking in different ways and using different techniques.
Our first speaker was Niham Bushnell, who is the Dublin’s commissioner for start ups. She was working for Talent Tech Labs in New York before coming here in Dublin.
As the commissioner for Dublin’s startup she explained us how a huge part of her role was to consider Dublin as only one and big startup to be able to improve the ease of starting a new business here in the city. For her even if the city is more little than some others (she took the example of London, but I think she was also thinking about her previous place where she has been working New York) and has less startups, Dublin has the advantage of being dense and has a concentration of “brains”. Yet she admitted that the city might not be turned enough to the international market which can lead to a lack of costumers and can break some future relations.
About Niham’s personal life, she had a lot of experiences in startups and this must be why she is responsible about it here in Dublin. Indeed she tried twice to start her own business but unfortunately succeeded only the second time (this was in New York). And her second business is still working there while she is working here.
There is only one point I would have change in her speech, it is that she was supposed to promote Dublin and actually she has been promoting New York all the speech long, telling us about how such a beautiful place it is to start a business (with the angel investors as an example). I felt uncomfortable for the Irish people about that, because it was like even if she was involved in Dublin’s startups, she was missing New York and as a result it was degrading Dublin’s image.
But it was my felling and I know that some students didn’t have it at all!
Then we had the chance to have David McKernan, coming for the Java Republic society which makes coffee and tea. He explained us how he did to create his own company which is now the second biggest coffee company in Ireland. He has been planning his project for about 5 years before starting it in 2000. And since it has been growing by 20% per year!!
This year they have engineered the brand by making more different kind of products. Their new objective for the future is now to keep innovating to be able to keep growing, and not being stuck.
For him this is the only ways to have funds while starting a new business:
- -private investors
- -bank
- -suppliers
- -entreprise ireland
- -BES
- -family
- -seed capital
He gave us some pieces of advice about these potential funds, as an example he strongly
recommended avoiding family, as putting your goods in mortgage if it’s not absolutely necessary. He explained also how private investors disappeared, indeed his generation blew all the possibilities we would ever have to get investors and we will have to find another way of funding our startups.
He finished by what he was considering as the traits of great entrepreneurs: trusting in yourself, being humble, having a malleable personality, hard working, a great storyteller, not being afraid to delegate.
DCU’s speakers:
And this is now the beginning of the hardest part to sum up ! Indeed we had 3 speakers in a row, all of them coming from DCU. This issue was that we didn’t have really the time to assimilate all the information given and even less to write it down. Because in addition they were really quick and have been chaining pieces of information and speakers; making everything really confused for me.
–Richard Stokes was the first one to speak. He is the Director of Innovation at DCU and also the CEO of DCU Invent. His role is to give opportunities for spin-outs and spin-inns to get involved thanks to DCU, by giving them help and advices for free (new ideas, new technologies, new market). The last 10 years DCU helped up to 35 spin up companies! Richard Stroke gave us the example of Frank smith who has been helped by the venture program of DCU for his startup. For him this program is focused in the technology space.
-Secondly we had the luck to listen to Ronan Furlong (ronan.furlong@dcu.ie) who is from
the newly created Innovation Campus of DCU (Opened since May 2014). He explained us quickly that this innovation campus was aimed at making research on three main topics: in energy (eg with Veolia), health (eg with Fujitsu) and ICT (eg with Siemens). I was impressed about how many firms are currently working with this Campus which seems so new! Indeed they are used to work with exergyn, layerlabz, Veolia, vspglobal, shimmer, nuwaves venture, fujitsu, novaerus, Siemens and much more!
They have the chance to be close to the university which makes everything faster, because of the experience of DCU with its several relations with firms. This kind of 
advantage has been really useful for a part of the innovation made in DCU which is made about the LED. Anyway the main idea of the innovation campus you have to remember is that companies from startups to multinationals all working together and developing new ideas and products, thanks to DCU. If you are interested in it and you want to have a look you can click here to see the flyer.
– The last speaker from DCU was Eoghan Stack, heading a nonprofit relation between the Ryan family (Rayanair) and DCU: the Ryanacademy. It comports several accelerator aimed at changing leadership roles, as tech venture program, accelerator program, online cert programmes, or entrepreneurship skills. And they have the first female accelerator in Ireland. This last one is focused on women but this is the only one, all the others are for every gender.
Another accelerator is the Ustart accelerator, which cans give 5000 euros if your group succeeds a competition for their project; in addition they are highlighted so firms can be interested in these new winners. Last year the winning group has made something about 3d printing. This is a good example to show how accelerators can help you making your own business!
Kealan Lennon was the 6th speaker of our session, and I can confess that I really didn’t like his presentation. To understand why let me first introduce him, he was representing Clevercards which is a brand allowing you to send greetings cards to your family or friend for their birthday or anything else, indeed it is possible to personalize them for any occasion. The main point to remember here is the difference from the other brands, because Clevercards is connected to Facebook and analyses most of your friends and pictures. So it sends you notifications to ask if you want to send a card to this or this friend/part of your family.
The thing I really didn’t like about this speech is that the speaker has been only talking about his brand, making a full advertising for it, without adding anything else useful for us.
The only and single thing I wrote down about something else than Clevercards is an 
advice about how to invest in a firm. According to him to be an entrepreneur you must be able to start your own business but also to invest in a lot of firms: “investing in 20 firms is risky but it is while waiting for one of them to grow up and develop, and this one will refund all of what you spent on the 19 others”.
We had also a little speech about photos on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Whatsapp. In my opinion it was shifted and unnecessary, the conference was aimed at explaining the concept of being an entrepreneur and starting a business not at explaining how social media are working.
So to sum up I would really have liked to be dispensed of his speech!
Fasten now your seatbelt because we are going to try to do something really tricky: understanding the brand of our new speaker Sean Ahern, the founder and CEO of ThankFrank. ThankFrank is a website which basically allows you to see who go on which website and make you able to thank someone for his article/blog/link/app by clicking “thank”. After several thanks from other users you can win awards, which can be spent to buy some stuffs, or you can give it for charity.
I can understand it is not that clear, so don’t hesitate to watch this video of the brand:
But let’s have a look at the tips Sean Ahern gave us! If people are going to invest in your startup, this is because they think you can DO IT, first of all. So if you have to present your project, you MUST be able to explain quickly and simply what you are going to do (but without forgetting something). He told us to do not be afraid to fail, that’s a new start and we all learn from failing.
While he was speaking, on the background were several slides with quotes of famous people in relation with the topic. Here are three that I liked and which are representative of the speech Sean Ahern gave us.
-“Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress. Working together is success” Henry Ford (importance of having a good team)
About it he added that it is always good to try to associate with people who are better than yourself, because they motivate you and makes you doing better.
– Entrepreneurship:
-“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall” Confucius
Even if I am not sure everybody caught what ThankFrank was about, this speech was really interesting and useful. I personally felt better after it than after the Clevercards’s one.
Finally the last speaker of the conference and so of my little summary; Paul Kerley is graduated of DCU and have been an entrepreneur and is now a business man. He is working with several boards for technology companies.
I can confess that it was not really entertaining because he had no slides and was in addition at the end of the conference, so much of the audience was bored. Even if I agreed with what he told us about how being an entrepreneur by believing in yourself (almost the same speech as we had already with the previous speakers, so I won’t dwell on it) it has been quite hard to follow. It was interesting, but not really well made.
Here we are! My little summary is now finished I hope you enjoyed it!
As always we had some really good speakers this day, with some really successful business man which have impressed most of the students and myself for sure! Don’t forget to tell me what you thought about my summary by voting below, or by leaving a comment!
Have a nice day!
Thomas Cozon
We are used to all this technology, so we can be indifferent to it (and me first). But when
combination of numbers (not even only binary number, composed only of 1 and 0) that
Let me now introduce the following speaker, 
to make the Nokia Lumia an afordable smartphone and in addition at the forefront of technology. By this way Microsoft wants to remove the « afordable Nokia » from its scale (the scale is composed by three steps, starting from the top: « Lumia », then « afordables » and finally « first prices » which have less options and can support less apps).
back with only a little boost and an idea. For this special case with Nokia, I think that if they use their ex-notoriety with the Nokia 3310 which is still really popular (especially on internet because there is the myth saying that this is THE unbreakable phone), they will be able to highlight their strengths thanks to Microsoft.
computing, it does also network services, it make powerful computers for companies (and
DICE conferences 
