‘Forget office space — Cork needs to support start-up ideas’

Cork needs to become a city where ideas can be tested and nurtured and less of a city of start-up office space, according to a leading tech entrepreneur.

DC Cahalane, vice-president of growth and marketing at Cork-based software firm Teamwork.com, said focusing on encouraging and validating start-up ideas could help the city become one of the world’s great start-up eco-systems.

“Thinking that the resources a fledgling tech start-up needs are anything like what a fledgling food company needs is like feeding a kitten and a baby elephant the same stuff,” he said.

“You work where you can. It’s what you’re doing, not where you’re doing it.

“The honest truth is that as a small city, what we badly need is more ideas and we need more start-ups. We need more people willing to take the plunge.

“What we’re pretty poor at, at the moment, is idea encouragement and validation.

“We have a lot of great resources in the city that encourage you to take the plunge, get started, jump from the airplane. Call me crazy, but I’d like to make sure my parachute is packed right before I jump.”

Mr Cahalane, a co-founder of Trustev, joined Teamwork over a year ago when it had just 14 staff. Today, the company’s project management software drives productivity at some of the world’s top companies, including Disney, PayPal, and eBay. Some 70% of its customers are in the US and it is set to double its workforce to about 100 by the end of the year.

He said he is concerned at politicians’ lack of understanding of how start-ups, and tech start-ups in particular, actually work.

He said Cork is home to some of the most financially successful start-ups to ever come out of Ireland — Trustev, Treemetrics, Teamwork.com — with others like Barricade.io, Konnectagain, Learnlode, and Groupbooked starting to make waves on the world stage.

He said being an entrepreneur is incredibly hard and that without the right kind of supports, it can be life changing in a bad way.

“We’re not Dublin, not London, and, unlike the rest of the world, I don’t ever believe that anywhere will be the next Silicon Valley, not for the next 25 years or so anyways,” he said.

“What we can do is take inspiration from the great, hardworking ecosystems of places like Tel Aviv, Israel, or Boulder, Colorado.”

Mr Cahalane is encouraging anyone with a tech idea to attend Start-up Weekend in Cork’s City Hall this weekend — a 54-hour bootcamp. Follow @swcork on Twitter for more details.