The Big Tech Show

This week, Adrian talks to John Goulding and Joe Lennon, co-founders of the workplace communications software firm Workvivo. The two just raised almost €15m in venture funding, having decided not to shilly-shally around with Irish VCs. Instead, they followed the bigger money trail stateside and landed it.

The chat involves raising money, growing a company from Cork and a host of other things.

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This week, Adrian has a lively chat with one of Ireland’s most interesting serial entrepreneurs, Norman Crowley.

Crowley built and sold three companies for $750m by the age of 40.
But he came tantalisingly close to selling one of them for $1bn. He explains how that episode hit him hard for a year. But he also now says that it was “the best thing that ever happened” to him.
Crowley has gone on to mix his love for the environment with new successful companies, including Crowley Carbon (which raised $31m earlier this year) and Electrifi, which reconditions classic sports cars into all-electric vehicles.
He also challenged Adrian to walk on hot coals, a dare that the host is currently considering.

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This week, Adrian is joined by the CEO of the country’s biggest online-only media publisher, Journal Media, and the CEO and co-founder of Silicon Republic, one of Ireland’s longest-running and most successful online publishers.

Adrian Acosta and Ann O’Dea dive deep into commercial and business challenges that media companies now face in Ireland.

Is online advertising for media firms doomed? That’s a big question that the panel discusses in some depth.

Alternate funding methods are also discussed, such as reader appeals and membership clubs. Acosta reveals that The Journal has attracted over 5,000 financial contributions since launching its reader contribution scheme two months ago.

O’Dea describes the factors around creating other businesses adjacent to media, such as conferencing.

And the panel looks at the prospects for different Irish media organisations from any new or re-organised ‘media fund’ that might be put together by the Irish government.

On the health of media, the panel also analyses some of the issues around trust, or lack of it, in press and media.

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This week, Adrian dives into the amazing story of Ireland’s most fantastically controversial startup of the last 20 years: Steorn. The company raised €20m on the premise of having invented a perpetual motion machine using magnets. The startup claimed to have uncovered an “anomaly” in the laws of physics that would allow for never-ending power.
From a full page ad in the Economist boasting of their breakthrough to a dramatic demonstration fiasco in London, the story of Steorn is a mixture of ambition, delusion and hubris.
To explain the ins and outs of the story to Adrian is Barry Whyte, chief feature writer for the Business Post. Barry’s newly-published book, ‘The Impossible Dream’, recounts in great detail the entire Steorn story, painting a brilliant picture of the characters involved, the key moments and the ultimate outcomes.

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This week, Adrian is joined by a vastly experienced Irish media panel in the area of digital media and technology: co-founder of Kinzen and Storyful Mark Little, founder of Maximum Media Niall McGarry and co-founder and editor of The Currency, Ian Kehoe.

The panel dives deep into the problems and opportunities for media in a technology-dominated landscape.

In his first extensive public commentary since his company’s examinership, Niall McGarry also addresses the issue of the ‘click farm’ incident in 2017 that saw the publisher of Joe.ie and Her.ie lose a substantial amount of revenue from advertisers after an employee was found to have manipulated listenership figures on an AIB-sponsored podcast.

“It was so isolated, such a one-off and so unique to a publisher like us that I think a lot of people jumped on it and made it a much bigger story than it was,” he says.

“It gave a huge amount of traditional media organisations an opportunity to have a pop at us because we came out of nowhere. We didn't come from the Dublin media set. We had created something new.”

Mr McGarry says that he wants to “put the incident behind us and move on”, instead focusing on “some of the amazing work we've done”.

“I think our organisation has been incredibly impactful on things like the Eighth Amendment referendum and on marriage equality. We were the first brand to get out there and get
behind a yes campaign.”

Niall believes that the company is “too big to fail” and has “too important a role” in Ireland not to emerge from its current High Court examinership process.

The Big Tech Show is in association with Fidelity Investments.

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This week, Adrian dives into the murky, colourful world of online fraud, scams and cyber security.

He and security expert Brian Honan look at the latest threats, occasionally getting side-tracked by the pros and cons of encryption, password managers and just how famous an Irish celebrity you have to be for your face to be illegally attached to diet pills or cryptocurrency scams.

They also look at resources in place in Ireland to fight cybercrime and whether more is required.

The Big Tech Show is in association with Fidelity Investments.

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Zoom is the single biggest breakthrough service of the 2020 global lockdown, in or out of tech. Before February, it was a niche business tech tool. 90 days on, it’s a global household name. Grannies, schoolteachers and friends now use it daily. It has replaced ‘Skype’ and ‘FaceTime’ as our default verb for video-conferencing. 

And the chief information officer, responsible for making large chunks of it work, is a man from Rathfarnham. 

Harry Moseley is unlike a typical CIO. He’s relaxed and easygoing with the emeritus demeanor of a board member rather than the guy logging 14-hour days to make sure everything is ticking.

Adrian hears from Harry about the “upsetting” moments over security reports in recent weeks. He also touches on his childhood here, including growing up as a Jewish kid in Dublin.

Adrian also talks to Vanessa Tierney, CEO and co-founder of Abodoo, an Irish firm set up with a specialty in matching remote workers to employers.

In a wide-ranging chat, Adrian and Vanessa go beyond the clichés of remote working to discuss the future of cities and whether there’ll be a generational split in who wants to live in built-up areas.

The Big Tech Show is in association with Fidelity Investments.

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This week, Adrian talks to Jonathan Ruane, lecturer in global economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), adjunct professor at TCD and a previous co-founder of Eventovate, which he sold in 2016.

Do Irish startups deserve a handout from the state? Or should it be considered a handup?

After all, aren’t startups supposed to define a bootstrapping and disruptive culture?

The two also tackle some much broader contextual issues around the culture behind startups and funding -- from anti-intellectualism to why inheritance tax should be increased to spur more innovation.

It’s a fascinating diversion into some of the deeper issues behind the daily debates that normally make up the bulk of discussions on the topic.

The Big Tech Show is in association with Fidelity Investments.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a packed episode this week, Adrian asks whether the gold rush for back-to-work thermal cameras in Ireland is warranted and looks at how startups are coping with live under pandemic conditions.

Thermal cameras are being painted as a key tech enabler to get Ireland moving again, from airports and hospitals to ordinary businesses. But TCD’s Dr Seamus O’Shaughnessy explains their limitations to Adrian in plain English.

Then the founder and chief executive of one of Ireland’s most successful indigenous software firms, Phorest, tells Adrian about startup struggles during the current lockdown.

He also explains how his company’s technology is helping hundreds of hairdressers in Germany to re-open safely.

The Big Tech Show is in association with Fidelity Investments.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Adrian talks to Alison.com founder Mike Feerick, who runs one of Europe’s biggest online learning platforms with 15m registered users.

Telling Adrian that April brought 600,000 new registrants to his site, Mike explains why the writing is on the wall for universities which are “too expensive” and “out of date”.

“Most employers just want to know that you can do a particular job,” he says from his Galway base. “I loved being at Harvard but it was for the people I met there, not the actual learning material.”

The Big Tech Show is in association with Fidelity Investments.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.