Notes for Week 49, 2024

Song of the week:

Notes

If you were expecting an update last week and noticed it was delayed by a week, that's my fault. This is a static site so I have to build the site before deploying it to the clouds in the internet sky. But because my post last week contained an unusual string in the text, it didn't build and I had apparently not checked if it worked and just assumed I was a brilliant computer scientist and walked away. Woops!

This week the news that rocked the tech community in Ireland was the news that the Irish government, in all of their infinite economic wisdom, is to shut-down the NDRC. If you're not in tech, or not in Ireland, you won't know that the NDRC is a funding scheme backed by the taxpayer to invest in early stage startups. It's run in various guises over the years, but most recently been in the more-than capable hands of the fine folks at Dogpatch labs.

I have experience with Dogpatch labs through $dayjob, where I moonlight as the Dublin Site Lead, so I get to attend events, launches, speaking opportunities and just generally get exposure to tech hubs in the country. Moreover, I have spent a bunch of time over the last decade or so being on advisory boards or being a bit of an agony-uncle to founders. Primarily in Dublin, London & Berlin. I've formally been a mentor through TechStars. And have a bunch of friends who have founded startups, some successfully, some less so. So I empathise with the situation, basically.

The backdrop of the NDRC closure makes the decision more baffling. It costs roughly €30m to run, but yields approximately that, if not more, thanks to dividends from startups. But we're in a strange economic situation whereby tariffs are likely to hit the European economic outlook thanks to el Preisdenté in the US. As an economy we're over-reliant on multinationals to pay into the tax coffers. Both directly from corporation tax, and less directly from the salaries that employees on good salaries put into the country through income, capital gains on stocks and just VAT on goods bought.

These arguments are all over the internet right now, and are probably boring if you're adjacent to the space. But my argument is slightly different: we now have about 20 years of people working in tech & pharma in Ireland. Enormous swathes of experience. People, like me, who went to college when Computer Science and similar subjects were scary, low-points-requiring courses that no one wanted to do. And on the back of that, we now have a burgeoning, thriving economy. But those people who went and did weird courses in college, worked in a few companies that grew their footprint in Ireland and generated not only economic value, but also learned and developed their own skills.

And this is where I have a slightly odd angle on this. We are not giving people with years of experience, skill and exposure to growing and developing tech companies enough credit to actually found their own, indigenous companies in Ireland, with the opportunity to develop the tech and grow the business. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who felt comfortable to take a risk to found a company after exiting Google, Stripe, HubSpot, Salesforce, or any other number of the dozens of tech companies who've been nurturing talent here for decades. Because funding schemes are dodgy, take a huge cut of the business, offer little guidance through advisory boards (or rely on volunteers to do it), and there is no safety net for failure. Americans feel empowered to innovate because they will not become destitute if their tech fails or the business doesn't land a customer base. They can keep trying, or start anew. Ireland does not nurture this talent or allow for opportunities to be taken advantage of.

Personally, I want to keep working in $job for a few years and watch the movie. In the next few years I will have 20+ years experience watching startups grow, get funding, go public, operate as a public company, operationalise around growth (going from 300 to 8,000 employees isn't easy!), invest in new products/regions/etc., develop product/GTM/etc. teams, etc. Yet the Irish government, by shutting down the NDRC, has said that those skills are only going to ever be of-use within a foreign direct investment context where I work for someone else. Even if I have a spark of a good idea based on the experience I have.

The Irish government has decided that it doesn't want Irish people to take risks and found companies. Ireland, as a result, is never going to be the home base of a founding story like Stripe.

(via my flickr)