Tommy’s Story behind IdeaStarter’s FinTech Student Hackathon

When it comes to events, you need to be a BOUSE at planning. And that is exactly who Thomas Devine is. For some reason the people we interview usually don’t like to be called by their actual name. Thomas likes to be referred to as Tommy. The highlight of Tommy’s life is how he went from one college to another, quitting both courses halfway through and started a venture called ‘IdeaStarter” (You might have heard about it, Well if you have I am sorry I will explain it to you once more, I hope you don’t mind, not now, I will explain it later though) but right now he works in AIB transferring millions everyday (Cha-Ching!!)

“IdeaStarter” as the name suggests is an event where you could come and start an idea. (Kmon how simple is that, so Why did I explain it you guys, I don’t know.) Ideastarter was organised by 3 key people, Tommy, Daniel Paul and Hesus Inoma with the help of many dozens. The spark came about when Tommy had an idea to organise an event to bring students of different backgrounds to start an Idea.

The planning and the actual organising started from February 2015 and it took a tremendous effort to make it happen. The venue was the Qualtrics Dublin HQ. The event kick started on Friday the 2nd and ended on Sunday the 4th of October. The event was apparently amazing! (I wasn’t there but, everyone who went to it “enjoyed it thoroughly”).

I was thrilled and excited to learn about their journey of creating Ideastarter, the “biggest Fintech event that happened in Europe”. They first started of with selling 1 to 2 tickets a week. They had only sold around 10 tickets just a week to the event. The pressure was mounting on them and eventually they pushed themselves to the edge. No sleep, food and hours of networking eventually paid off. Just a couple of days to the event, the tickets were all sold out and went even beyond their capacity upto 192 people.

“A lot of people think that they can get funding very easily but you’re wrong if you’re one those people. Bank of Ireland contacted us, that kept us going motivated (One of the high moments, Tommy shared). When we got out of the building, we were literally jumping up and down. DCU offered their co-working space. All of a sudden Ideastarter started looking well. Krust did the catering and many other companies came to our aid.”

As I mentioned before, Tommy now works in AIB transferring millions of money to different accounts everyday. He really enjoys it as well. I mean who wouldn’t ;). Tommy’s current position in the bank demonstrates that his event planning skills paid off. He said it himself, that one of the main reason he got that job was because of IdeaStarter.

During Ideastarter, Tommy highlighted that he learned so much that no college or degree could have ever taught him. In his is words, “experience always wins against qualifications”.