Tom Raftery

Excellent Conor – well done for starting this up here. I’ll be there (and I promise I won’t dance!).

Conor

Well if you’re not going to dance I’m cancelling!

We do have a great opportunity here and I hope it just grows and grows with new faces appearing all the time as they find out about it and realise the value of networks like this.

haydn

Can’t make Friday unfortunately – have found a source of manure (really) that I simply must dig into that day.

Am interested though, maybe seeing if there’s a story there.

Is there any movement in the vc/funding community since you wrote about your disappointments up inDublin?

Conor

Pity you can’t make it but hopefully we’ll be having them regularly so we’ll catch you at one of the future ones.

As predicted by several people I talked to beforehand, VC in Ireland really isn’t interested in early stage tech funding so the focus must be on Angels and other sources.

I have been impressed with the work that CorkBIC are doing in this area with the BAP and I hope their pool of investors grows quickly.

The key thing needed is lots and lots of high profile successes. Iona was a lonnnnnnnggggg time ago and we’re not going to have monthly Stockbytes. I would love to see regular €3m-€10m exits in the Irish tech space to keep the buzz going and draw in more entrepreneurs and more investors.

One point that was made to me this morning was the silver lining aspect of the Motorola shut-down. Hopefully we’ll see a burst of start-ups down here being built using the redundancy packages that people received. The ideal would be for those companies to end up employing more than Moto ever did.

James Corbett

Well done on getting this off the ground. I would advise not worrying about the number of people who show up the first week… and to determine that you would continue doing it for a number of weeks regardless.

That was the advice Dave Winer once gave about organising geek meets, and he was quite right. He said you should just blog about it – where it’s on and when and then blog about it afterwards explaining who showed up and what you talked about, posting a few photos too. Then just do the same again on the following occasion, and the following… and eventually people will start coming along out of curiosity if nothing else!

Of course it could well be that you get off to a ‘big bang’ start in which case you can happily ignore all of the above

Conor

That’s great advice James, thanks.

I like the idea of photos but we need to be careful not to snap anyone mitching

I’ve also been contacting people directly who don’t necessarily read this blog and I hope we can draw in lots of people from outside the Irish blogosphere.

We could have 5 people on Friday or 30 but irrespective I hope we keep coming up with ideas for getting a good spread of people involved.

Paul Sweeney

Can’t make the first meeting conor as in Dublin. But would love to attend future events.

Larry Ryan

All going well, I hope to make it along Conor.

John Prendergast

Great idea Conor!

Looking forward to the kick off.
I’ll be there…

JohnP

adam

10am is a bit early for us culshies, and I’d prefer an OpenPints night meself anyway.

Dillon Thomas

Big thumbs up for the initiative.
I hope it goes really well.

Eoghan McCabe

Hope it goes really well, Conor.

walter

Hope to see ye there.

Walter

keith bohanna

Flip – going to be in Cork later tomorrow evening with my brother and two of our kids so would have found time if it was an evening event.

Enjoy lads (and ladies?)

keith

Conor

Thanks all, I think it’s going to be an interesting two hours. I’ll be in a BarCamp Ireland t-shirt if anyone wants to identify me!