coclarity

Well Webmission is over. I’m in New York on the way back, tired, waiting for a plane to Shannon. First impressions? An exhilarating week for coClarity, meetings with potential investors, potential partners and old friends. From an overall economy point of view I detected some good news, some green shoots seem to be appear for early stage funding for startups. However, some VCs and funded companies are still hurting. Imagine a humidifier and a dehumidifier sealed in a room, fighting it out.

Mike Butcher wrote a post about the early part of the Webmission week. You can even see the back of my balding head in the photo. I’m the one talking to Joe Kiernan and Diane Roberts.

I remember my last visit to Silicon Valley with PaddysValley in late 2007. Mark Zawacki from Milestone Group said something like, “Its not a question of whether there’ll be a recession or not but whether there will be a recession or a depression.” How prescient he turned out to be. This time the mood in the Bay Area seems to indicate a corner’s been turned. I talked to CEOs in a number of early stage startups including HeyZap, DropBox, Skout and Echodio and all believed the funding environment was improving. When the worldwide economy starts to turn around it’s probably going to start in Silicon Valley.

While early stage funding seems to be making a comeback, the VCs and later-stage funding is still in disarray, companies are having to raise money to fund operations as bank credit has evaporated even for companies with impeccable records.

We visited a private incubator called Plug And Play. Business incubator managers of Ireland: this is the future. Plug And Play have startup office space, in-house experienced mentors, turnkey services, hosting and they invest in some of the startups too. Its all geared to increasing the velocity of their startups. Some of their EIRs (Entrepreneurs in Residence) said this is the best time to start a company. While its harder to raise money, and that money is more expensive, rents are low and talent is available. Normally PlugAndPlay would see five startups a week getting funding, at the moment that is down to three (still not zero). As you can see from the photo below, they have a steady stream of investors coming through.

The contrast between Webmission and PaddysValley was interesting. Webmission was more organised and all of the companies were at a more mature stage, some of them were even profitable. PaddysValley was more spontaneous and chaotic (in a good way), we did after all meet Jerry Yang, Marc Andresson and the guys from Twitter. Webmission’s pitch event attracted less than 10 investors whereas the PaddysValley event organised by Enterprise Ireland probably pulled in over thirty, albeit in better economic times. At Webmission everyone got the chance to pitch.

One of the highlights of the trip was watching Keith Bohanna blag his way into a party at Micheal Birch’s house.

The entrepreneurs on Webmission were an impressive bunch. Most were profitable and established businesses, some of whom were more interested in establishing a presence in the US than raising funding. The companies included: Artesian Solutions, Booking Bug, Brave New Talent, Business IT Online, Compliance And Risks, Corebridge, Mtivity, ProofHQ, Viapost, Replify, Yuuguu, Zemanta, Huddle and Trampoline Systems.

Two of the companies were Irish, Compliance and Risks from Cork and Replify from Belfast. Compliance and Risks do exactly what it says in the name. Replify build an impressive SSL/TCP/file-server/web-app accelerator that can be deployed as a virtual appliance.

From a coClarity point of view I had a very productive week. I met potential investors, partners and customers. Something concrete will definitely come of the trip. I spent three days at or around Web 2.0 Expo and found most of the collaboration technologies still taking the same approaches that I saw at Enterprise 2.0 last year. One of the more interesting new technologies I saw was Socialtext’s Desktop product, a nice combination of REST APIs and an Air application.

Anyway, that’s not the half of it. I’ll be going through my notes in the next few days, and I’ll write another post when I’ve had a chance to reflect on everything.