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The Size Of Dublin Size Helps Tech Community Thrive
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Eamon Leonard’s office is above a pub, it is Dublin after all, and is the classic start-up office; small, cramped and littered with Coca-Cola bottles. But there is a sign outside the building on Dame Street offering “impressive Office Suites” to let.
“They can’t be talking about mine,” he quips. But it is his office up for letting as Mr. Leonard and his team, currently only three but he is expanding rapidly to at least 12, is shortly to move into a 6,000 sq ft space next to Google’s offices in the west of the city.
Orchestra, of which Mr. Leonard is the founder and CEO, was acquired last month by San Francisco-based Engine Yard, a company that for a number of years has helped to define what Platform as a Service (PaaS) means to developers.
PaaS is a cloud-based offering that allows developers to concentrate on building their sites, not worry about the infrastructure. They handle all of the deployment as well as managing the servers, handling peak traffic etc.
His exit, the amount has not been disclosed, is one of the latest for Dublin which sees itself as a small, but key player in the European start-up scene. And while today Dublin enjoys a very good reputation as a friendly and active place with a very strong tech community, it wasn’t always that way.
According to Mr. Leonard, who has been an active member of Dublin’s start-up community since starting his own company, Echolibre, in 2008, it was only relatively recently that the community started to behave like, well, a community.
“It’s only in the last couple of years that things have changed. I have been a developer since the late nineties and back then we didn’t have the same sense of community as we have now. In fact there was a lot of animosity against people operating in the same space.”
Blogging, and more recently Twitter, were the spark that brought people together, he said. “I think Twitter had a real catalyzing effect. We started to organize events.”
Dublin is a small city with an intimate feel. Mr. Leonard tells the story of taking the CEO of Engine Yard out for a tour of the city one evening. Walking past government buildings he sees a couple of figures emerge out of a door and walk past them. “Evening lads’, said one of the two. “It was only then I realized it was the Taoiseach [Irish Prime Minister], Enda Kenny. The Engine Yard fellow was blown away,” he says.
That intimacy, and the active community, meant it will be easy for Mr. Leonard to scale up his operation, he says. “I will have 12 on board in the next few weeks,” he says. He did advertise for staff, but had already identified people he wanted who were active in the community. He hopes to be at 30 by summer 2012.
He is not too concerned by the threat from the big players. Dublin plays host to the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Google, Zynga and just recently announced, Twitter. (The joke making the rounds was that Twitter would open an office in London, but only for 140 characters.)
“There are some people who say these guys come in and hoover up all the talent, but at the same time, these people are not lifers. They will come out after two or three years and be number one in a small start-up.” But he was less impressed by the contribution they make to the start-up community as a whole.
“I have actually met one person from Facebook. LinkedIn, Yahoo, we never hear from them.”
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