Cork OpenCoffee Club Announcement
Written on March 11, 2007 by Conor O'Neill
After a bit of discussion the inaugural Cork OpenCoffee Club will be held at 10am this Friday 16th in Luigi Malone’s on Emmet Place in Cork City Centre. UseAMap.
The aim of the club is to bring together a good mix of entrepreneurs, investors, developers and marketers, plus anyone else who is interested in growing the start-up community in Cork. Organisations like it@cork and the CorkBIC are incredibly important in fostering professional networking in Cork and I hope we can make OpenCoffee complementary in many ways to them.
The aim is to make it a welcoming, well-known venue which achieves practical results rather than just being a social outlet. On the one hand we want anyone in a start-up or thinking about doing one or thinking about working for one to turn up and build links to their peers. But more importantly, we need to get the investment community and the support organisations involved too so that they can identify the upcoming opportunities and provide advice where appropriate. The idea is that it is mutually beneficial for all who attend.
If we can also get involvement from third level institutions then we could have something very special indeed.
I’m sure we’ll just be finding our feet at the first few meetings. I think once every two weeks is sufficient for the moment and I welcome any suggestions for how to make it stronger and more useful. Please do spread the word about this. Better to have too many people next Friday than a damp squib. There are no requirements other than to turn up, engage and drink beverages.
To find out more, read Saul Klein’s posts on it here.
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Excellent Conor - well done for starting this up here. I’ll be there (and I promise I won’t dance!).
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Can’t make the first meeting conor as in Dublin. But would love to attend future events.
All going well, I hope to make it along Conor.
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Great idea Conor!
Looking forward to the kick off.
I’ll be there…
JohnP
10am is a bit early for us culshies, and I’d prefer an OpenPints night meself anyway.
Big thumbs up for the initiative.
I hope it goes really well.
The Serendipity of OpenCoffee…
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Hope it goes really well, Conor.
Hope to see ye there.
Walter
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
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!