Thanks for the comment!

In my experience there’s an element of out-of-sight, out-of-mind with regards to SV. In a previous startup I worked in we were constantly having to fight against the fact that competing startups based in California were getter better funding and doing better deals than us. We (twice!) lost a real position of leadership in the field we were in because of it.

There’s also the inevitable incestuous nature of any relatively small community. With their backgrounds it looks like the picnik guys are very well connected and if you’re well connected and, relatively speaking, live next door you’re more likely to get picked up.

Anyone remember Glockenspiel? An Irish company who back in the day had one of the first commercial C++ compilers around and a good relationship with Microsoft to boot. I remember thinking back then that when MS brought out their own C++ compiler they would simply buy Glockenspiel to do it. Didn’t happen and Glockenspiel disappeared.

Fintan

I main thrust of what I took from the Paul Graham piece was that the advantage of silicon valley is simply the higher concentration of people obsessed with tech and business startups ( as opposed to the availability of cash)

Also, there was a bit of news there last week that colours the discussion a little more. Walter Higgins/sxoop/pixenate had one of the first (if not the first?) online photo editors positioned for the usage of the Flickr community. Pixenate had the presence in the flickr forums and Catherina Fake (co-founder of flickr) had used pixenate personally. Quite an achievement for a Cork-based company whatever way you look at it. Great product/service/positioning and timing. Yet yahoo/flickr did a deal with US-based picnik (one of the many johnny-come-lately companies) to provide their online photo editing service last week. From the discussion that followed it was clear that many of us felt a pang for Walter on hearing the news. And several began to reexamine the question of just how much ‘being there’ may be able to influence the outcomes for your business. I’m not saying that there is a clear conclusion. There are many examples of Irish companies becoming world-beaters from an Irish base. The truth is I would hate to see all Irish start ups begin to believe that they have to be over there in order to be at the races. I think that much opportunity would be lost if that attitude were to take hold. Ideally I would like to find a way to tap into and bring the two worlds together in a natural way. And again I think we can see auctomatic demonstrating that this can be done successfully.

Thanks for the comment. I’m not sure about EI’s focus but I do agree that their heritage is very much back in the manufacturing era rather than tech and other new industries. My own experience of them from working in a startup was that we put a lot of effort into talking to them about getting funding, meeting them here, meeting them at CeBit in Germany etc. etc. This went on for ages and we eventually walked away because we were getting nowhere.

The numbers for YC are based on this link: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/auctomatic/

Cheers

Fintan

On another note, are those number right for Y Combinator? the $5k + $5k per founder for 6%?

ian

Thanks for the comment and the clarification. I guess what that means is that while I got a key piece wrong, the general substance is probably correct in that EI are far too conservative.

Cheers

Fintan