Monday and Tuesday last week (2nd and 3rd November) saw myself and Gerry McQuaid sitting in Trim, Co Meath representing dbTwang alongside 14 other businesses, a number of EI'ers, some of the Internet Growth Alliance founders, the coaches who will be working with us, a couple of panelists on Tuesday and the leads from the US and UK for the actual workshop delivery.
A lot of people, a lot of time and a lot of planning.
Which delivered a superb start to this much talked about program. In evolution since early summer it came out of the experience of Colm Lyon on the Leadership for Growth program and drew on the entrepreneurial experiences of Ray Nolan and Dylan Collins (there were others as well - see their site for full list). Enterprise Ireland in the guise of Jennifer Condon joined in, a budget was carved out and Brian Caufield drafted in as progam lead.
Day One was Jonathan Dillon. An Irishman in San Francisco and with such gems from his past as "Would you just take the billion Mark" (he ran acquisitions for Yahoo for a couple of years and they made an offer for Facebook at one stage) he could have been irrelevant to early stage startups. But wasn't. He took his experience and made it relevant to us - specifically in the area of Mission, Vision and Strategy. In the middle of it all Colm Lyon did a great talk on his experience with Realex Payments and showed us the actual presentation he used when raising money very early on.
Day Two saw Ed Bussey on the floor. Whose most recent sale I knew about as it was Zyb and is now Vodafone 360. He joined the management team there but was a founder of figleaves.com in the good old days of DotComOne. He worked through business models and shared a lot of his practical experience with both his businesses.
The panel also happened on Day Two. Colm Lyon substituted for Dylan Collins (who was in negotiations, the results of which were in the Business Post today - having sold Jolt Gaming to Gamestop - congrats), and he was there with the founders of Daft (Eamon Fallon), Hostel World (Ray Nolan) and Gifts Direct (Lulu O'Sullivan).
Each of the two days finished with a 1.5 session with our coaches - 4 of them having 3 or 4 businesses in each group. They will also be spending one to one time with each participant business.
Outcomes for dbTwang? I got something special from it - being the only founder there with an investor and non-exec director (Fintan my co-founder stays mainly on the guitar industry side as that is his core area). 2 days immersion was a great environment. Tangibly by Friday of last week we had strongly refined the value proposition we will be using for the next 6 months or so and using that same refinement to focus our operational execution.
Well worth it - and all participants agreed. From a group who would not be tolerant of having 2 days wasted that is saying something :-)
Thanks to all who put it together.
keith
Comments