Cork is full of great, selfless organisations — charities & social enterprises whose volunteers give selflessly of their time to help others. They split their time between helping others and raising money to fund their efforts, not an easy proposition for anyone. …

Startups are businesses. Why do some people seem to forget that? Especially the people running them. Not just ordinary businesses, but business at the hardest point in any journey; the start; where every minute, every hour, every day is valuable and irretrievable when wasted. …

We were bricking it. It was the final of Startup Battlefield, the highlight of Techcrunch Disrupt New York, the world’s toughest pitching competition. Four long days of preparation, working on slides, owning our numbers, researching the judges, trying to guess what sort of questions they’d throw our way, technical rehearsal…

It feels like sometimes the key failure in current policy towards developing a proper, fully functioning entrepreneur ecosystem in Ireland is pretty much based on the current assumption by the government and related parties that entrepreneurs are morons. Entrepreneurs aren’t dumb (well most aren’t) so those who want to start…

A lot of first-time founders and startups are going out to raise money these days. It’s pretty hostile territory at the moment. And they usually start off awful, I mean really, really, really bad. Their only experience of this kind of finance is usually limited to their own personal finance…

It always amuses me when people in the startup space talk about Unicorns as something to aspire to — an imaginary creature thats more fiction than fact. Let’s face it, the guys and girls you want to meet and hang out with are the Rhinos, hard nosed motherfuckers that everyone…

Today, I read something that made me weep. Well, actually, it made me angry, so damn angry. In a advert for new ‘business mentors’ for a local enterprise board in Cork, it was highlighted as part of the application process that any applicants must have their own professional indemnity insurance…

48 hours ago, in one fell swoop, Stripe, a company famed as one of Ireland’s great missed opportunities, changed the game for a whole generation of new Irish technology companies. Through its new product, Atlas, Stripe, already the payment platform of choice for the majority of new Irish startup companies…