Irish entrepreneurs visit Silicon Valley (T. Sims photo)
Johnny Beirne has a pretty interesting little business. His Irish company, Textatrack, sells music downloads to cell phone users via text message. You enter a code number for the track you want to hear, text it to the company, the song appears on your phone and the cost it is added to your monthly wireless bill.
Textatrack has contracts with carriers in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, but Beirne wants to sell his service through a carrier serving the U.S. market.
That’s why he and 12 other entrepreneurs traveled from the Emerald Isle to Silicon Valley this week to connect with entrepreneurs and potential investors here.
About 75 people, including Irish-American business people from Silicon Valley, gathered at a hotel in Menlo Park Thursday night to network and share advice on how Irish startups can expand their business here.
“There is a great culture in Silicon Valley of giving back,” said Leslie Murdock, an investor and financial adviser to tech startups in the valley. He was one of three local experts on tech startups who conducted a panel discussion for their Irish visitors.
Murdock and the other panelists urged Irish entrepreneurs hoping to get established here to connect with Irish-Americans here, many of whom would be happy to introduce them around.
“You need to get a toehold in here and use other expats already here to get into their network,” added Doug Kelly, a founder of Alloy Ventures and an investor in medical device companies.
Besides Textatrack, Irish companies along on the trip included a maker of software for the health care industry, another maker of software used in commercial printing, a mobile marketing firm and a medical device maker.
The trip was organized by CEIM, a business development group in Ireland. Its local hosts were Enterprise Ireland, the Irish government’s trade agency in the U.S., and the Irish Network of San Francisco.
Also along for the trip was Joanne Grehan, an executive with the Western Development Commission, a business development group in Western Ireland. While encouraging Irish companies to expand into the U.S., WDC also wants to encourage them and U.S. companies to do business in seven western counties (what we call states) in Ireland. Already, Western Ireland is home to subsidiaries of U.S. companies such as Abbott Laboratories, Baxter Medical, Boston Scientific, Medtronic and Nortel, she said.
Besides the event Thursday, the group visited a business incubator at the University of California-Berkeley, Sun Microsystems, Skype, the Internet phone company owned by eBay, and with various venture capitalists and other advisers, said Grehan.
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