Highlights of Dublin Web Summit

blackiebest

I would love to hear opinions from those there on the night. Was if great, good or disappointing? Are there any videos of speakers (legally available), would love to have gone and I am very curious to hear how it went.

Thanks,

BB

fergalr

blackiebest wrote: »

I would love to hear opinions from those there on the night. Was if great, good or disappointing? Are there any videos of speakers (legally available), would love to have gone and I am very curious to hear how it went.

Thanks,

BB

Right..!
Well I said
http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=64314539&postcount=29
that I'd try a write up.
Here we go...


They did video the talks - no idea if/when these will be released. A lot was said. I couldn't capture it all, and didn't try to.
I'll try highlight interesting things.
I didn't record anything though, except jot down a few notes on paper, so its quite possible I misquote people, or write what I wanted to hear - I make no guarantees! I also make no guarentee that anyone else will find the same things interesting as me! And I'll be quite informal.
I'd appreciate if anyone does find this useful if they'd let me know on the thread or by PM. Its quite possible no one will, but I'd like to know if anyone does - and also if anyone wants to discuss any of this, or correct where I'm wrong, feel free!


The schedule was pretty cool. Talks were short, and moved along quite well. Often people only had 10 or 15 minute slots. This meant they said what they wanted to say quite quickly, and cut out the fluff.

It started with Mark Little.
Mark said DWS was an opportunity and attempt to listen to people who had 'walked the walk' and not just talked about it; people who had built growing businesses.
This was a good sentiment, and one thing about the evening that worked really well. We didn't have to listen to much political rhetoric BS about the smart economy; instead things were practical, real, and often entertaining.

Mark said there was a large increase in the number of startup companies this year as opposed to previous years.


Fred Karlsson talked about donedeal.ie
His talk was very interesting.
Donedeal is the biggest irish classified ads site.
I believe he said they had 30m worth of goods sold 'through' the site in January.

I thought this was a huge number. I've no idea what their average transaction is; you could work it out from their site pretty easy - but even if its as high as e1000, thats 30k transactions in jan, at e3 fee each, which would be 90k/jan, *12 ~= e1m/year revenue. If the average transaction size is 100, revenue is closer to 10m/year. I'd guess it might follow a power law, to around 20 euro; I dont know - but either way, thats a significant business they've built, so fair play. I can't imagine their running costs are that high either.
I was amazed- I'd never heard of them up until DWS; nor have 3 out of 3 friends I've asked. Just goes to show again that things that spread via word of mouth tend to diffuse in clusters, and take a long time for /everyone/ to find out about.

One really interesting thing he said was that they got over the original problem of bootstrapping their business (its always hard to get your critical mass at the start for an online community) by putting all their personal possessions up for sale on their website, under different names. This meant they had to sell some of their personal stuff, but got the site going. I thought this was very clever, and really captured the entrepreneurial spirit!
They also built the website in their spare time (both Fred and his OH are technical, afair, and so could built it all themselves).

One thing he really emphasized was using phone based micropayments infrastructure as a way to remove barriers to payment. He said it was a really easy way of setting up payment infrastructure, and means they don't have to process a load of separate transactions.
Sounds like a good idea, and seems to have worked well for them.
He came across like a cool guy - great to see people like this succeed, and in Ireland too. Hopefully they find some way of taking it international.


Dylan Collins was up next. He said this was a great time to scale a business.
Personally, I think this is unarguable - from a technical point of view, its easier to build a webscale business than ever before, with the business models of cloud computing, and web dev is getting easier and easier.
He also emphasised big platforms, and talked a little about Farmville, and Zynga (those guys behind Farmville, MafiaWars, and the other rubbish viral facebook games) and the huge scale of their operations.
Clearly, he's right in that there's huge money being made on online 'social' gaming, for platforms like FB and app store, with ads and micropayments, that wasn't being made before.


Colm Lyon of Realex talked for a while. I thought he came across really well. He said they didn't expect the growth they had in Realex. He said there are some huge businesses selling globally. He mentioned chainreaction cycles who are selling hugely into europe, and are a small company based in NI (great bike shop, btw). He mentioned them as a successful company.

One thing he mentioned was that Realex found they had to be close to their customers to build a good relationship. He also talked about them building relationships with banks over years, which took a lot of time to get right. He also mentioned that selling to the UK was a great opportunity for Irish web businesses, on the basis that its a huge market, with a lot of people shopping online, and almost as easy to post stuff to as anywhere in Ireland. He also highlighted that certain brands here had made a good transition to online recently, and were selling well even in recession, although others weren't making the transition well at all.

Ciaran Bollard of muzu.tv talked about their business. They provide a way for content providers to interact with user generated content without risking 'damaging their brand'. They essentially provide high quality advertising experience, and guarantee their advertisers that their brands won't appear in inappropriate settings - which does a lot of damage to the brand. They mentioned that they get very premium rates for the advertising as a result of being able to really ensure a good experience for the advertiser, while also enabling the people using their website to get access to high quality content. He mentioned the advertising rates, but I didn't note them down. It sounds to me like they are just going a step further than google - google provide higher value ads by targeting them - muzu go one further and try and provide an even more targeted and appropriate ad platform. Its quite interesting - a managed web2.0 interaction is a really good business to be in, needed by big brands.


Mark asked the guys what they thought the biggest thing the government could do for Irish web businesses was. One answer (form Fred, I think) was increased availability of broadband. (The old chestnut!). His sentiments were echoed by some of the others.

Dylan suggested a 0% VAT rate on virtual items, on the basis that this would bring a lot of companies to Ireland.
This point got criticised later in the evening (dont remember by whom, maybe matt or craig) as encouraging a 'race to the bottom' mentality; it was suggested that instead making somewhere a nice place to live, would be better.

Someone, think it was Colm, said that both seed funding, and bank credit, were important and needed to be a priority. This seemed to be widely agreed.
(And obviously, good seed funding is rare and hard to get in this country, compared to say california, so thats probably a consensus opinion.)

One point that came up here that was interesting, can't remember the context, was that Colm Lyon said the future of payments online was probably pre-paid - so debit, rather than credit, and that credit cards were old technology, not suitable for the internet era.
I thought this was an extremely interesting observation. It seems to take forever for the world to roll out a good micropayment infrastructure, and solve the (relatively easy) problems of credit card fraud online.
Dylan highlighted that any online entity needed to support as many forms of payment as possible - make it easy for your customers to pay in whatever way suits them.


Chris Horn spoke.
He was really interesting.
Described some of the early history of Iona.
Said he met the guys starting SUN (Joy et al) when he was in stanford, academically.

He found that inspiring, and saw that if they could start a company, he thought he could too.
X years later himself and some partners from college each put in 1000 and started a company.
Obviously, they built a corba reference implementation and got in with SUN in the end, but it was very interesting to hear how the ran their business on a shoestring beforehand.
They couldn't get any capital from anywhere, BES, banks, VCs everyone turned them away.
So they did anything they could, training courses, any sort of consultancy available, teaching coding, programming device drivers, to make ends meet.
He talked specifically about their financial planning, where they used the amount, in months, of running_costs_covered, as a throttle for how much consultancy and other non-core work to do, vs how much to do on their own work. They had to have 3 months costs covered to work on their own stuff - 4 was lots, 2 months was tight.

In the end, they went to a tradeshow in the moscone centre in SF, demoed product, and got loads of interest. (Sounds like a lot of startups - like that scene in pirates of silicon valley).

Interesting to hear him say that when business partners came to Ireland they had meeting in TCD CS building, rather than in their offices, which were not fancy, in case their partners would see how small they really are.
I think every tech startup in the world has done this. Always good to hear you aren't the only one!


Chris also talked about Ireland, and our advantages and future. He's on one of the newish government advisory panels so I guess he is pretty informed about this.
One thing he noted was the abundance of free spectrum here for testing rollout of new communications networks.
(personally I didn't really get this. I understood what he was saying, but I really wonder how relevant this is to Irish web companies. Maybe its a glass-half-full way of looking at the fact our comms infrastructure is awful. I guess if you were a large multinational looking for a place to testbed something, maybe its useful, but I don't know.)
He also said our diaspora were a huge resource.
(Certainly, this is true, there's enormous good will to the Irish internationally. Or at least there was - hopefully we haven't squandered it and become known internationally as gombeens...)

He said we should have more relaxed banruptcy laws in Ireland, that 12 years was too long, as opposed to 1 in the UK, and that this would encourage enterprise.
This is an interesting point, but I'm not sure I understand. Isn't this what limited liability companies are for? Surely they adequately shield entrepreneurs from personal asset risk? Maybe he's right and we also need individual protections - but if there's no big downside to personal bankruptcy, you've got issues of moral hazard as well. I dont know. It was an unusual point, but Im sure relevant to an audience of entrepreneurs.

He also said simplified regulatory framework would be a good thing.
Having being involved in a startup here in the past, I'd absolutely agree with that.
Running a business isn't rocket science, but its a lot more administrative hoops to jump through than it should be.
I would love if it was easy to register - and wind up - companies online, and possible to fill out all the tax requirements for a business online. I know the revenue are getting better, but I see no reason why it couldnt be possible to be guided through a simple user friendly online system that takes care of everything. Make it really easy for people to start businesses, and they'll start more businesses - there's good opportunities that are never explored because starting a company is perceived as an involved thing to do- opportunities to make 5k that could lead to more, but are never pursued. (In an unrelated point, I think we'd encourage a lot more enterprise if we made it easy for people to get on and off the dole - but thats another story).

He also mentioned the emigration policy, and said it was important we made it easy for smart foreign people to setup shop here.


Matt from wordpress spoke.
Came across as a really decent guy - almost an accidental entrepreneur - and *really* *not* a serious captialist - interested in nothing but filthy lucre - at all.
His talk was very wordpress centric. It was really interesting to hear how they've built a functioning distributed team from a core of people that worked on an open source product. I think these are really hard to build -but I guess they worked together for free before doing it for money, so they knew that people would work and follow through on their promises. Its still hard to communicate detailed technical 'vision' remotely though, so I'd be interested to hear more about what they are doing right!

He really highlighted usability testing for building websites.
He talked about distributed usability testing, pushing the ability to test out to distributed people, doing less formal tests, follow a simple protocol, and using that to learn about software usability, without needing a lab.
For me, listening to him, a lot echoed Joel Spolskys talk about 'hallway usability testing'.
Matt also said HTML5 was cool, and could be a big technology to watch (personally, Im hearing that from a few different people recently.)


Craig Newmark spoke.
He also seemed like a bit of an accident businessman. He said he didn't mean to get involved in a large business; started off an email list, and it got big.
His view on business (already well written about) is very unusual.
Very slow expansion, only coming somewhere when they are wanted, and really listening to and engaging with their users before making changes.
On Joel's axis of whether a company is more following an 'amazon.com' model of expansion, or a 'ben&jerrys', these guys are definitely the latter.
It was interesting that Craig noted he wasn't the best manager, so he did customer support, and let someone better at managing people manage the company.
This is maybe not always the easiest thing for an entrepreneur to learn, so it was interesting hearing him say it. It sounds like (I really have no idea though) he still is involved heavily in the strategic steering of the company.

They get a lot of their revenue stream by charging for job listings. Recruiters are the main source of income.
He was asked about the relationship of CL with ebay (minority shareholder, bought stake of other CL employee). He was very calm and polite about it, but didn't say much other than that they were in litigation!

fergalr

And putting this into a separate post, because there's a bit more personal opinion on this and less 'reporting':

There was a roundtable at the end.
Afair Mark Little steered this to a few journalism style topics. Don't really remember the other bits.
Obviously, he's doing a startup in this domain is is pretty interested in it.

Ben Hammersley was entertaining and seemed pretty clued in.

Mark Little was talking a lot about information and journalism and the future of journalism. As a journalist on break and trying to get into the enterprise space he's trying to figure this out.

There was talk about journalists as analysts, as opposed to news reporters, and the future role of newspapers and so on.
This is a very personal opinion, but I'm really not sure how relevant any of that discussion is.
People talked about Murdochs paywall. Again, I may be wrong, but who cares about it? This is just dying dinosaurs thrashing around; its too late, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Ben Hammersley made two points that I found myself hugely in agreement with - if you're media business has had ten years, and if you haven't figured out how to survive in the web, you don't deserve more time, and its too late.
I was at a talk 10 years ago by one of the big Irish Times guys trying to figure out how to deal with the Internet, asking most of the same questions I've seen certain Irish journalists ask recently. That was 10 years ago. It is now too late.

Ben also said something else - that we were living in a media journalism bubble. I think he is absolutely on the money here - he was saying there were just too many paid journalists, more than ever before and something had to give. I haven't heard that said before, but I think its completely right.

Ben also said something that I completely disagree with, where he talked about how technology didn't change things, and that the basic human issues were still the same.
Sure, most human issues tend to be somewhat timeless - but technology absolutely does change things. The internet is the most disruptive technology we've had for ages; its only getting started, and I think people *still* haven't realised how disruptive it is. There's a lot of technology coming down the pipe thats going to solve a lot of these problems the journalists are trying to position themselves to solve - and they just don't seem to be aware of it.
I may, of course, be wrong, but I think its clear that journalists are *not* going to be the ones doing the analysis, or the aggregation, or the content matching.
Certain people are trying to position themselves as the ones to solve this problem, but I think if you don't have a deep understanding of the technology, or an awareness of the potential ways in which things might change, its not an easy thing to reason about. Coming from a technical background, I know theres a lot that you can't know, and that amazingly disruptive technologies can appear very fast.
I can make some guesses about whats disruptive on the horizon though, and I think journalists trying to reason about this space should make sure to learn about them.



Anyway, thats some thoughts I had - said I'd write a report, being snowed under since; curious to hear other perspectives, or feedback...
Again, apologies for the stuff I've got wrong. Really enjoyed the talks, very stimulating stuff.

blackiebest

Fergalr,

Big thanks for your account. I have read both posts and am feeling a little green that I did not go:mad: It sounds like it was worth it. I am sure I might have some questions which I will post when I have a bit of time. I am very suprised that I seem to be unable to read more online about such a big event.

Anyone else like to offer their 0.02c worth?

selekta

Thank you for your time to post this, this is very valuable insight.

It's actually quite easy to go off the dole to a startup, there is the Back To Work - Enterprise program where you keep getting your dole for two years after starting a business (100% first year, 75% second year). It can apply to both Sole Traders and Ltd. companies. Additionally, advisory services are provided.
Two years should be enough to start a web business or at least gain some employable skills trying.
I understand you can go back to the dole quite easily too, but might be wrong.

Ireland is rated the top EU country in terms of ease of running a business, I read somewhere abroad.

LookingFor

A little belatedly, but just to add some colour to the above info on DoneDeal.ie. They had a leaflet in the promo bags describing their startup process and growth, including number of published ads on the site in various months over the past 2 years or so.

In Dec 09 they had 56089 active ads on the site. Kind of impossible to derive a monthly revenue figure from that, since some of those ads would be older than a month, but still..

They say 'growth' - I guess as measured by number of active ads per month - is 10-15% per month. They also say their total turnover at the end of 2009 was €1m (note though that they didn't say annual turnover...I'm guessing this figure is for the gross revenue since launch).

Looking at their site, it seems they attract a lot of high value goods. Cars, boats, motorcycles etc. Makes sense given the flat fee per ad - they don't charge commission, unlike ebay etc. so they probably have a (perhaps accidental) niche in higher value items. €3 is a super cheap fee for an ad vs 2 or 3% of a car's typical sale price...

I was pretty amazed by this story too. Had never heard of them either prior to DWS, and I'd never have thought there'd be room in the market for another classifieds service, alongside the likes of ebay etc. Was only founded in 2005, and by then ebay was already well entrenched here, so hats off to them for giving it a go. I guess it shows just how big the web is, even in a local market like this.