It’s time to get real.

Dublin is not the best place to raise VC money in Europe. It’s not the best place to raise VC in Western Europe. It’s not even the best place in what was once the British Isles to raise money.

I want Dublin to be a better place to raise funding. I want my home town to be an amazing place to start and grow a company, but if we’re going to do that, we need to think about it in a systematic way and do very specific things to help create an environment where that becomes reality.

Drew’s article on this topic on Dublin Globe has its heart in the right place, but it doesn’t stand up to a more rigorous analysis. I commented on this on LinkedIn previously, but I just wanted to update those thoughts. Here’s an edited version of my original comments (full version can be found here).

I think the issue is that the UK numbers refer specifically to tech investments, where the IVCA numbers also include things like nursing homes, pharma, fridge rental firms, food and snack firms and more besides, so the numbers aren’t quite like with like as a result. That would skew the results significantly. That might also skew the numbers in the seed-Series A comparison. On the seed funding side of things, I think EI are definitely one of the more active entities in early stage funding in Europe — I’m not sure I’d consider them a VC in the traditional sense. The BrightSun data again refers to tech startups where the EI data covers a far broader spectrum of business activities. Also, I’m not sure that BrightSun are on the nose there — it feels to me (even anecdotally) that there’s a lot more seed rounds happening around Europe. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of their data.

The Series A comment also doesn’t stack up for me. Is Intercom an Irish company? No. It’s American.

Movidius were started in Dublin, but their HQ is in San Mateo now — so really, they’re American as well. If we’re going to make claims like this, they need to be ones that we can back up.

The path to Dublin being an amazing city in which to start and grow is going to be a painful one to navigate. We need to stop kissing the badge and start accepting reality.

Dublin is a great place to start, but the reality is most companies will need to leave in order to grow. That’s natural.

Dublin is a great place to start. I’d love to hear more stories of how someone left Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft or another one of the massive companies that have come to Ireland over the last few years to start and scale a business in Ireland. I’d really love to hear success stories like this.

Dublin is a great place to start, but Dublin startups need more support from older businesses and Government. Most of the Estonian startups I mentor have multiple contracts with telcos and other big businesses that help them with (small amounts of) revenue and, more importantly, give them access to users and the qualified feedback that brings. I don’t see the same level of openness and support in Dublin.

Dublin is a great place to start, but let’s not kid ourselves that EI funding is any substitute for real seed or Angel investment. Investors can be a massive pain in the posterior, but they’re also invaluable when it comes to intros, therapy, sound (and occasionally painful) advice and much more besides. In some cases, they even know what they’re talking about.

Dublin is a great place to start, but even partners at Ireland’s bigger VCs are saying that the capital gains tax situation is creating a disincentive to start businesses in Ireland.

Dublin is a great place to start, but as I mentioned in a previous article, we need more angels, syndicates and smaller investors to get involved and bring their cash and their smarts to the table — the difference this would make would be almost unquantifiable.

In short, Dublin is a great place to start, but we need to be realistic about our place in the world when it comes to seed, angel and VC funding for technology businesses. We need to stop patting ourselves on the back and saying we’re great.

It needs to be better. Companies in Dublin and the rest of Ireland deseve better, but let’s not kid ourselves about our place in the funding world. The risk in doing that is that we fail to take the steps necessary to make Dublin a world-class place to start a company, grow a business, raise funding and exit (and repeat).