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How did Google come to be working with 1,500 Irish start-ups? “People sometimes laugh when we say we still think of ourselves as a start-up. It’s not that long ago when it was Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin) cobbling together this idea for a search engine at a time when there were plenty of search engines. It’s that mentality of being a start-up and having that mindset of being an innovator, but we recognise that we are now big, we’ve been successful, we’ve got resources, we’ve got an understanding of international markets and we want to share that with start-ups who are at the stage we were at 15, 20 years ago. We probably have 300 people from our site here who are actively and regularly involved in helping start-ups. We’ve created different programs, some to help people understand how to use Google technology, and the likes of the app hub that works with early stage app developers. We also have areas where we offer mentorship and help to start-ups over a course of a weekend. Your idea will get beaten up stretched, compressed, challenged and potentially killed – but the good ones will come out with a business plan. We’ve invested in a local incubator which is part of our global hub of start-up incubators so it means that any Irish company is automatically a member of our global network of 25 incubators – you can rock
up to the incubator in Israel and San Francisco and you’ve immediately got a desk, a group of friends, access to that network in that city. We’re trying to oil the wheels of the start-up environment as much as we can. It’s about reinvesting in the community and making sure that we can do what we can to support in and to make it grow.”
So multinationals can work with the entrepreneur? “Over the last few years I’ve seen a surge in the level of start-up activity here. Not so long ago I read a headline about Dublin having more start-ups per capita than Berlin. You do hear the narrative of the multinationals hoovering up the talent but now you are seeing people going back into the start-ups. And that’s the way it should be, certainly when a company first lands and it’s growing, it’s one-way traffic. As it gets to a certain size and maturity, then you get a much more symbiotic relationship.”
The Irish workforce is gaining a solid reputation for being smart workers. “When I headed off to Japan there was a great success of young Irish graduates landing and being one of the few nations who had been able to work in that very unique culture because they worked hard, they delivered
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results, they had a brilliant way about them, of understanding the culture. Whether it’s Tokyo or San Francisco, I see the same thing happening. We are a smart bunch, we’re educated, we recognise that there is a big world out there, we know that we’ve got to go out and build relationships if we are to be successful. Increasingly businesses today are international, whether you are running it from Ireland or you leave, and I think Irish people do tremendously well in the international context.”
Has the tech explosion in Ireland surprised you? “In 2003 if someone had said, you’re going to need to build a company that is over 5,000-strong in Dublin with an international workforce that serves 60 markets and covers 40 languages, would you chose Dublin, I’m not sure we would have because the model hadn’t been proven that you could build something of that scale, with such diversity in a location like Dublin. But we’ve done it. And now lots of other companies feel very confident that they can land here and do the same thing. The numbers came out during the week: Dublin is still one of the best cities to live and work in and to be able to attract the very best talent from across Europe the Middle East and Africa to come and work in Barrow Street is a testament to that.”
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