Mr. Eoin Costello:

There is no charge. We also attended the launched of the Action Plan for Jobs, which, courtesy of Mr. Karl Aherne, took place at Wayra, and discussed with the Ministers of State who attended on the day our action plan for change. Last week, we received the good news that we have been accepted as a full member of Startup Nations. This means Startup Ireland is now in the same league as Startup Chile, Startup Malaysia, Startup Australia, Startup Canada and so on. We are also preparing a pre-budget submission to the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation on behalf of the start-up community.
I will now speak about what we are doing on the grassroots side. Without the grassroots side, this is not a sincere movement. We have been extremely careful to pay full attention to the grassroots side. We have linked in a group which now has 4,000 members actively exchanging information and networking about start-ups activity and programmes. We have 7,500 Twitter followers on our account. In terms of our social media footprint, we are leveraging it to the benefit of the community. For example, highlighted in red on the slide now showing is an awareness-raising campaign which we ran for the NDRC female founders programme. We helped spread the word about it across that big social media network. We also took on board a lesson from the entrepreneurship forum report, that the network in Ireland needs to become much more dense and integrated. As noted from the slide, we have set up a site for each of our key cities. What we try to do is put ourselves in the mind of somebody who has just arrived in a city and wants to establish a start-up or get something off the ground. We have infographics and network on each city site and a guide to tech events. In terms of Dublin, this is provided thanks to Russell Banks.
In terms of our activity, at a cultural and educational level, I recently spoke at Google's first ever conference in Dublin. My goal in that discussion was to bring on side the really important corporate venturing side. There are many multinationals located in Dublin but we do not have their corporate venturing business. My focus during my speech on that occasion was how we can become a global hub with the corporate accelerators playing a major part in that. Also on the cultural side, we are organising the first ever entrepreneur careers day in November of this year in conjunction with Global Entrepreneurship Week. My attitude is if lawyers and accountants can have a careers day, so too can entrepreneurs.
On our vision, a number of us attended a workshop convened as part of the activating Dublin initiative at which Mr. Moran posed the question of where the vision is for the tech start-up community. There is a lot of great activity and so on but there is no uniting vision. We then decided to examine a number of vision-led projects from the past, including the IFSC. I am sure members will recall that in the 1980s the IFSC was a derelict site and an idea. Today, it contributes more than €2 billion annually to the Exchequer. In the late 1990s the IDA had a visionary strategy of attracting the main data centres to Ireland. In terms of my own former business, Novara Technology Limited, I was delighted because this meant we had top quality data centre facilities which were better than those in most other countries in Europe. As a result of that strategy in the early 1990s, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so on have invested hundreds of millions of euro in their data centres located here. They have also located their cloud centres for Europe here. We are now in a situation whereby data centre capacity per capitais one of the highest in Europe. This came about through that strategy.
We then went back to the drawing board and looked at the possible scale for this in terms of the activating Dublin initiative. In other words, what does wanting to make Dublin a leading global start-up centre look like? Our vision for Dublin starts at culture level, where we want to scale-up the collaborative activity of connecting students and people in middle management who want to do a project with a start-up or internship in a start-up. We want to get the basics at this level right. Also, if Startup Tel Aviv and Boston MassChallenge can have international competition, we should leverage The Gathering, which is an amazing international network, and establish the Startup Gathering, thus leveraging the 60 million Irish diaspora worldwide to make a real input into Ireland a global tech hub.
In terms of infrastructure, we are chronically short of hotdesking and incubation space for start-ups in Dublin. This must be a major part of the vision. In terms of accelerators, there is a strong tangible impact from vertical accelerators, which can accelerate and scale-up start-ups.

Why not be the accelerator capital of Europe and set that as a goal by 2020? It is highly achievable. That will feed into a much bigger pipeline of high potential start-ups for Enterprise Ireland, which is in all our interests. There was an evaluation carried out by Forfás of supports for entrepreneurship in Ireland and it indicated that due to the success of the high potential start-up unit, there is an opportunity to scale up considerably the number of start-ups.
Members may be interested in hearing about Dublin and we see it as the cockpit of Ireland but we already have activities and operations elsewhere. I was in Cork a number of weeks ago meeting some of the start-up community members, and there are start-up champions in Limerick, Galway and Belfast, where I did my masters degree. This is an all-Ireland initiative, and any of the gains made for Dublin will be shared with the other start-up ecosystems. Clusters must represent regional advantages and resources so there is no reason we could not have really strong and world-beating discrete clusters for food, medical services, ICT, energy and bio-farming working in conjunction with Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland's existing strategies and frameworks.
We have been very upbeat so far, although we have spoken of the challenges for Dublin, even aside from those in hurling. Nevertheless, some people in our community feel the battle has already been lost, as things are being fixed when they have gone wrong. Some people make the case we are a satellite of London and have become part of London's so-called tech city pipeline. This argument has some merit when we consider the statistics. An analysis by the Startup Europe Partnership considered the start-ups which secured an investment of €1 million or more in the past three years, and of the total in Europe, London has 26% of those scaled up, with Berlin having 16% and Dublin having 6%. The downside is that when there are successfully scaling start-ups, it attracts venture capitalists. We have discussed how one of the challenges is the round of €2 million to €5 million. Those venture capitalists are attracted to the likes of London and Berlin. They include Balderton Capital, DFJ Esprit and the big players attracted to the big centres. As identified by the Startup Europe Partnership, a significant number of successful start-ups end up transferring their headquarters - not intellectual property activities - to either London or north America.
Considering the density of corporate-backed accelerators in London, there will be a challenge that we should tackle head on. London is similar to Tel Aviv as it has big players like Google Campus, Microsoft Ventures, Startup Bootcamp, Seedcamp etc. One can look at the output of just one of these centres in London, such as Google Campus, which in 2013 alone saw 70,000 people attend events, with €34 million raised by start-ups involved in the campus. Campus members from 61 countries around the world visited that location, so it is a magnet for attracting people around the planet. Females make up 20% of campus members in London, compared with an industry average of 11%. The man in Israel argues that Google Campus in Israel is an amazing engine of growth for start-ups.
With regard to my goal, my son Cillian is seven months old and this is a battle I want to win. I am very personally motivated to make Dublin a global tech start-up hub. By the time Cillian sits down with his career guidance teacher, I want a career in entrepreneurship to be the number one choice rather than legal or accountancy jobs. They are great professions but if we are to bring the next generation of growth through, we need to encourage start-up activity. There must be a well-integrated system of support so Cillian should not have to move to Silicon Valley or London unless he absolutely wants to.
We are probably aware that all our cities are very much silo-oriented, with much good stuff going on but never the twain shall meet. The issues are quite fragmented. To address this, Startup Ireland, beginning with Dublin, is going to convene a meeting of the key pillars in each sector of the start-up ecosystem and get decision makers together on one day in one room. We should come up with co-ordinated strategic visions for each city, starting with Dublin. We invite the committee members to Google on 10 October, where the session will be facilitated by Mr. Sean O'Sullivan who addressed the committee in February. He is the chairman of the Entrepreneurship Forum report. It will also involve Mr. John Moran, the chairman of Activating Dublin, and we are absolutely delighted to have Mr. Brad Feld, the guru of how to build a successful start-up community. Our goal is to create a single shared strategy for Dublin.
The message we want to air is that we should forget about the excessive focus on our corporate tax rate or on us recovering from recession. Let us change the international discourse about the country and send a message to the world that this is a land of opportunity for start-ups who want to take on the world. This is a realistic message. Forbeshas found Ireland the best country in the world to start a business and The Wall Street Journalhas found that we top the European average for venture capital funds raised. According to the World Bank, we are 15th in the world from 185 countries for ease of doing business. We have nine of the top global software companies located in our country and we have three of the top accelerators located here. It is a realistic ask. Our goal is to make Ireland, as an initial point, a global tech start-up hub and we ask the committee to join us on 10 October. We also ask the committee's support in our vision.