coclarity

LEAP is a year-long enterprise and management development programme hosted by the Enterprise Acceleration Centre @ Limerick Institute of Technology. We were selected to facilitate a workshop and day of training on project management. Ronan Skehill, one of the LEAP participants, wrote a great summary of the day.

I believe project management is important for any business but crucial for start-ups. In a start-up everyone needs to be a project manager, everyone need to make sure they are pouring effort into things that will matter to the business.

I’m making the slides available here (PDF files)

1. Introduction (6.6MB)
2. Traditional Approaches (2.3MB)
3. Agile & SCRUM (6.1MB)
4. Productivity, GTD and more (1MB)

If you have any questions or suggestions, please fire away in the comments section below.

Great news. On Monday we pitched and demoed coClarity to an investor panel as part of the end-of-year LEAP programme showcase. At the evening reception, we found out we won the “Innovation and Market Entry” award. We were as happy as windmills in a storm.

At the reception we did a three-minute pitch to everyone who attended the showcase. Unfortunately, we’d been distracted by the other big event that evening (Apple’s WWDC), so the three-minute pitch was only two minutes long.

We were delighted to get the award (and money), but we were just as happy to get fantastic feedback and questions from the judging panel. Our bank manager was at the reception too, and he was happy to see the cheque.

We’d also like to congratulate the other winners on the night, Off We Go Publishing, and Pedigree Cattle. We’d like thank Donncha and Graham who run the EAC and LEAP. We’d also like to thank the other 11 companies who were on the LEAP programme this year. We learned a huge amount from each other.

So if you’re thinking of starting a business and you’re based in the mid-west of Ireland, check out LEAP. You will learn a lot and you might even win a cheque as tall as you.

Enterprise Ireland are running a number of 2-evening workshops in April and May. Many of them are happening in the Munster area. You’ll find more details on the EI website.

Another week, another Tuesday Push. This week we’re pushing for MyMunster.com the Munster Rugby Fans social network. We’re based in Limerick and our offices are 200 yards from Thomond Park, the site of many Munster miracles.

I’d signed up for MyMunster ages ago, but that password email combo was long lost in the mists of time. So I signed up again today. Unfortunately the sign-in had some kind of bug and I was redirected to a non-existent page.

Initial glitches aside, the site is great for Munster fans. A simple home page, an interesting blog and discussion forums that pull no punches.

It would be even better if all Tuesday Push blog posts got a ticket for the upcoming Heineken Cup Quarter Final against Ospreys.

After the business incubation day seminar I’m beginning to think this recession might be a good thing. At the very least there’s a bit of a silvery tinge on the dark clouds. You’ll find slides from the seminar on the EAC website, but as usual the more interesting stuff happened over the tea and biscuits.

During his talk, Richard Grey from Matheson Ormsby Prentice described the fairly complex legal process in bringing in VC investment. While smaller investments from angels might not need to go through all these steps some steps are still relevent. You can wait until you have a term sheet before getting a legal firm involved but the final term sheet should be fairly detailed (5-ish pages). The costs on the company side should be lower as the legal fees are mostly to respond to a term sheet (he mentioned a figure of approx 3000 euros).

Frank Walsh of Enterprise Equity gave an overview of the investment process from a VC point of view. In the midst of all the recession news they are still closing deals.

I asked Richard if they had any plans to open source neutral legal agreements like Y Combinator are doing with WSGR in the US. Unfortunately, the answer is no, but surely this is a great opportunity for some legal firm in Ireland.

Sometimes the best part of these kinds of seminars are the discussions with other attendees that happen afterwards. This is where the silverish lining emerged. Some people believed while the VCs are becoming more cautious they will still do deals albiet less deals and reduce the reduce the average investment. That might put them into the investment range of many of the Web/Software companies who are looking for €200-400k investments. This class of companies have been in a bit of an investment vaccum recently as commented by Fergus Burns in Joe Drumgoole’s post about VCs in crisis.

Then yesterday the Irish government announced a new plan to setup a €500 million investment fund involving three US-based venture capital companies backing small Irish and foreign-owned high-tech companies setting up in Ireland.

So I’m thinking maybe this recession is a good things for smaller companies, the 95% of companies who didn’t need enough cash to register on VC radar in the past. Maybe these companies will even get some of the help the government seem to be trying to give them in this latest announcement. Then again maybe I’m a niave optimist.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!