Eoin Costello
How did Eoin’s entrepreneurial journey begin? “My Dad had a jewellery business at the time in Dublin, quite small, just one store. I used the money I had made in London, partnered with my Father and we went up to three stores. Then through my work with the jewellery business I became involved in local politics and sat on the County Council. I was really interested in getting concrete action done for people on the ground.
“My Dad was a sole trader and was the type of man that liked all his numbers on the back of his hand. He was also always interested in delivery a service personally. However, you can’t expand that model, he couldn’t be in all three stores at the same time. I tried to get my Dad to move towards things like EPOS systems and he wasn’t having any of it. The downside of that was we had serious stock shortages at our busiest times of the year as a result of everything being paper driven. Seeing the arrival of the internet and the opportunities it offered, my Dad and I sat down and agreed to separate aspects of the business.
“We have been able to attract entrepreneurs from other countries who want to come to Ireland and develop their business” - Eoin
and students how to commercialise their intellectual property and provides unparalleled expertise, skills and resources for budding technology start-ups. What is even more interesting is that they welcome technology entrepreneurs the world over and offer a host of benefits if you choose to take advantage of their programme and set up shop in Ireland.
I spoke to programme manager Eoin Costello to find out about his own entrepreneurial background and why he decided to get involved in DIT Hothouse.
“I worked in the stock market in London in the late 80s early 90s investing in small and medium quotes companies - I’ve always been interested in business” says Eoin, as we arrange to meet for our interview in a quaint coffee shop in Dublin’s city centre. “Finding out the formula for success in business and the DNA behind that success intrigued me. After spending five years on the fund management side of the table I wanted to swap sides and build my own business.”
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“I then tried to develop the jewellery business on the web. As a low risk start I created a prototype for the web store but people who visited the website complained that the images were flat and they would rather the personal experience of trying on a ring or a necklace in store. I got back to the drawing board because I knew that the web would make a huge difference and that technology would radically change the way business is done. As a result of that thinking, the gap in the market that I saw was building the infrastructure behind the web. So I began a website registration and hosting company.”
Lacking experience in this area of IT, Eoin set did his research, joined technology discussion boards and met technical experts and developers as a result. He then set up Novara Technology, a web hosting and access provider business, from a spare bedroom in his house.
“We got so busy that we had to move into town and over the next 6 or 7 years we built it up to 10,000 customers and we had about 15 staff” says Eoin. “With Novara we helped SMEs get their businesses online and we had a reputation for developing web applications that automated previously manual procedures for our clients. I sold Novara to Digiweb Limited in 2008. I then took time off to travel and while I did that I set myself some goals. One of those was how to deal with the challenges and the opportunities that SMEs were going to experience in the coming years due to Web 3.0.”
Eoin then began to identify the point at which Dublin began its journey towards becoming a start-up hot spot. He tells me that the government began introducing enterprise boards in the late 1990s in an effort to support early stage start-ups,, but prior to that starting up a new business wasn’t regarded as a ‘real job.’
“Thanks to enterprise boards and the support of Enterprise Ireland the start up culture here has changed and thank God it did” adds Eoin. “If we continued to focus on
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