Mr. Sean O'Sullivan:

Primarily, the best hope for an entrepreneur, in terms of access to customers, is to get customers to love his or her product and to pay for it. Aside from funding from family and friends, the primary source of funding for the most successful entrepreneurs comes in the form of customer revenue. We can overemphasise finance and many entrepreneurs actually spend the first year actually seeking funding for their business rather than actually delivering something which is so valuable to a customer that he or she will want to pay for it. Even if the entrepreneur is barely scraping by, if he or she gets enough money from that customer he or she will be able to start his or her business. Crowd funding is a way to do that. Programmes such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo are Internet sensations in the context of facilitating customer funding of businesses. They are phenomenally successful ways for entrepreneurs to use technology to reach customers directly. Those streams are good. We also recommend a crowd-funding initiative whereby people can loan capital to businesses and avail of an exemption. As a result, money which is currently lying under the mattress or sitting in a bank account and attracting interest at a rate of 2% or even 0% can be put to use in funding a company.

We think that type of funding is also helpful. Those are areas that technology has innovated and created new opportunities for entrepreneurs to find access to capital more rapidly.

Second, the Deputy talked about reducing taxes. To me, this is about reducing barriers as well, reducing paperwork, the complexity of types of documents and funding and there being almost a hundred different types of VAT. I recently noted from a hotel bill that the hotel had five different rates of tax - 9%,11.5%, 13%,17% or 21% or 22% of whatever the rate was for the different items the hotel sold, whether it was for something sold in the restaurant or for something else. There are elements that are needlessly complex that are constructed with all good intent but it would be simpler to have less complexity around them and less complexity around aspects that help start-up companies get started, such as leases. Why do commercial leases in Ireland seem to require lawyers to get involved? That is nuts. Why is that so often necessary? With co-working centres we would cut out all that. One would show up and get a desk. These are ways to accelerate the first stages of start-up of a company. These are measures we are trying to recommend as "best in class" ways of trying to get around the barriers the Deputy pointed out. Does anyone else have any further responses or questions on that?