Ms Niamh Bushnell:

I thank the committee for inviting me. It is a delight to be here. I am the Dublin commissioner for startups. This role is a collaboration between Dublin City Council, Enterprise Ireland and the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and it came out of the Activating Dublin report, which was published in August 2013 and which brought together all the stakeholders in the community in Dublin to talk about how we could make Dublin a great start-up city. One of the key recommendations was that we needed one message, one role, one voice and one platform to position Dublin internationally as a great start-up hub and start-up city, along with all of the other great start-up hubs and cities like London, New York, Berlin and Silicon Valley. That is my role in this job.

To put my comments into context, I have been in the tech world for all of my career. I spent the past 16 years in the States. I applied for this role from New York and when I received a "Yes", I came home and set up shop here with my family. In regard to my background in the States, I initially worked for Enterprise Ireland for six years as a VP of software, helping Irish tech companies come into the States. It was a very exciting role. Many great Irish tech companies are coming into the States all the time, as we know. I then worked for Orbiscom, an Irish payments tech company, which was bought by MasterCard in 2009. It is another great success story out of Ireland. It is a really great exit to a really great parent company, MasterCard, which has set up MasterCard Labs in Dublin as its global HQ for payments innovation. Out of an Irish start-up which moved to the States very early, we have this great innovation centre for payments based out of Dublin for the world, which is very exciting.

After that I started consulting, working with companies coming into the States on an individual basis. It was very similar to what I had done in Enterprise Ireland but off my own bat and in my own company. I did that for a couple of years and then I started to invest in start-ups. I am an angel investor in a group of start-ups in New York - ten start-ups in total. I started to invest in 2011. Two of those companies died on the vine, as they do, and seven of them are still going strong. One of them had a great exit. We have not done too badly so far. One of them which is still going strong and we think will eventually get a great exit out is a woman-led company called PublicStuff, about which we are very excited. That is my background.

After investing in companies and getting very close to the start-up scene in New York as a mentor and an investor, I caught the bug to set up some start-ups myself. I set up two start-ups in New York and was in the middle of my second start-up when this role came up in Dublin.

The reason I applied for the role was because I had been coming back to Ireland on a regular basis and had seen the start-up scene here emerge as something very interesting with huge potential and with a lot of energy. Every six months I came home and each time I could see it had taken another giant leap forward. It was exciting for me, coming from a great start-up city like New York, to come back to Dublin and get that same sense here in pockets around the city and then to see more and more of it. All of a sudden, back in 2013, I got that sense as I walked around this city. I knew Dublin had arrived as a great start-up city and it was now a question of growing it.

When the role came up to be the Dublin commissioner for start-ups I thought to myself what a great opportunity and what perfect timing for Dublin, this is a window of opportunity that Dublin has, I have a lot of experience on all sides of the start-up world and I can add value in this bigger role in Dublin. Lucky for me I got the job and here I am. That is my background.

The role has many goals and metrics which I shall encapsulate into two things. First, I want to put Dublin on the map. As I mentioned before, Dublin has arrived. There are many great start-up companies in Dublin. We are very innovative in many different areas of technology which range from payments to enterprise software. We are doing some great stuff in consumer Internet and on the Internet aspect of things. There is no shortage of role models, success stories and potential for global leadership in certain categories, coming out of Dublin. It is just that the story has not been told outside of the country. Nobody knows that Dublin is a great start-up city. One can guarantee that is the truth in the US, Europe and further afield.

The first goal of my role is to put Dublin on the map. I want Dublin to be spoken about and to be a member of the club when people talk about great start-up hubs like New York, Berlin and London. Ireland in its own way and with its size - not to compete or copy them but be of our own selves - can be a great place to attract talent and act as a magnet for start-ups, investment and innovation. We are starting to do so. That train has left the station. It is just a question of how we speed things up and get the message out.

The second part of my role strongly reflects my background. As I have spent the past 16 years in the US, I can help Irish companies to internationalise more purposefully. We do a very good job, with Enterprise Ireland, in providing support for companies to get into foreign markets. We bring foreign investors into Ireland and the Government supports all of these activities. The next step that needs to be taken is to help companies, at an earlier stage in their careers, to imbed themselves on the ground in their primary markets, wherever those primary markets are located. Often those primary markets are in the US but sometimes they are in other countries.

It is very important that the emphasis of start-ups is taken off funding, to some extent, and focused on markets. The following questions must be asked: Does one know one's markets? Does one know one's customers? How can one validate customers? How long has one spent with them? How can one benefit from the talent that sits on those markets? How can one bring that talent on board at the right time for one's company? How can one build relationships with investors early on so that they can be investors when the time comes to scale them up and get that kind of investment? I am convinced that if companies do not spend more time in the primary markets that they are selling into then they will be unable to compete globally. That is one of the big challenges that we have and is one of my areas of focus. We are doing lots of different things about the situation.

Enterprise Ireland does an outstanding job and we support a soft landing for companies into the US. What we really need to do is imbed them into the communities they are selling into and imbed them into the start-up industry that they could join in New York. The Germans do this in New York by way of providing an accelerator option for German companies that is very competitive and the Canadians do the same thing. During my time in this role I want us to move slowly but surely in that direction. I have a project this year that will start us off on that route. I have outlined the big goals for my role.

In terms of women in tech, we are going in the right direction. It is a positive story when compared with the statistics coming out of Enterprise Ireland. In 2011, EI supported seven women-led companies in total from across Competitive Start and High Potential Start-Up schemes. In 2014, EI supported 43 companies in total, which represents 23% of its overall funding and was spent between Competitive Start and the HPSU companies. That percentage is way ahead of our international partners. In the US, funding across the board for women-led companies varies from between 15% and 20% and in Europe the percentage is even less. A rate of 23% means we are doing a very good job and more of that is the story we need to tell.

When it comes to companies that need to scale and one is looking at the venture capital market, we have very few Irish female VCs. This is a concern for a number of reasons. Obviously, the female-led companies that pitch to VCs are talking to men who see things through a male's lens and a man's understanding of the world. However, it is even more challenging if the companies they are building are female oriented, in that they may be fashion companies, jewellery companies or something women understand more innately than men. Consequently, it is even harder for women to sell and pitch an idea to try to create this vision of a global market if they are sitting in front of men only as the investors at the table. While there are a lot of super investors in Ireland and lots of educated global citizens among them, we need more female investors, VCs and angel investors in Ireland and this is something which should be encouraged. Together with STEM, we should encourage greater proficiency and more talent in the financial area and women to be the people who make the decisions about who is and is not funded and who helps them to scale. This is another area that is very interesting.

Outside the VC area all of the research will show - Enterprise Ireland's in-depth research and interviews with female entrepreneurs also tell this story - women's lack of confidence to "big up" their businesses in comparison with men. This is typical and not just an Irish thing. I also saw this in the United States and I am the product of that fear of positioning oneself too broadly. However, in general women are afraid to tell the big story and to have "wow" numbers. They are afraid to put themselves out there because they are always anxious to know how they will get to that place. They want to move step by step and position that deliberate and measured approach as to where they are going, but that does not work in a fast moving, technology-driven, highly ambitious investor and customer market. Women must be able to talk about their vision for a couple of years hence in respect of where they are going, who will be category leaders and from where they will get their customers. They must have that big story at their fingertips.

When I was looking for investment in the United States, I had a couple of mentors who helped me to prepare my pitch. One female mentor looked through my deck and told me that it simply was not "wow" enough. There were not enough big numbers in it; there was no big vision. She told me I would not get the attention I required and that I needed to increase the numbers significantly. I responded by saying they were the numbers with which I was comfortable, that this was what I was comfortable saying and, were my back to the wall, they were the numbers behind which I could stand and support in the future. I said I wanted them to believe in me as somebody in whom they could invest. Her response was succinct: I should think like a man and pull it out of my proverbials. That was a moment of realisation for me that while I considered myself to be strong willed and confident - if not a feisty entrepreneur - I was still unwilling to pull the figures out of the air and stand behind them.

We need to help women to present better and have the confidence to imagine the dream and bring people on a journey when they talk about their businesses, wherever they may be going. It does not need to be global domination or a billion dollar company, but whatever is the capability of that business and however big is the market, women should be able to position themselves as being able to take a massive share of it. That is how one gets investment and one excites markets. That is how someone convinces large companies to roll out his or her product when they have never heard of his or her company previously. Success needs that confidence to be able to pitch and sell and one should then fill in the gaps as one goes along. A person does not need to have all of the answers - nobody does - and every entrepreneur is in a dark tunnel for the vast majority of the time. He or she is just figuring it out step by step as he or she goes along. It is an iterative process, about which one should not worry. We need to talk a lot more to female entrepreneurs, as well as to all other entrepreneurs in Ireland. This is something entrepreneurs in Ireland, when compared to somewhere such as the United States, do not do well. We do not "big up" our companies or talk about changing the world or being category leaders, but we need to do this a lot more often to get the attention we deserve because our products are worth it.

While the quality, innovation and leadership are there to be seen, the marketing is lacking.

My second start-up was tech-heavy in that we invested all of our own money on the tech side. Although I have worked on the tech side world all of my life, I have always been involved at the business end and have no background in technology. My partner and co-founder was a man and when I was down in the mines with him trying to understand what was going on from a product development roadmap scenario, how to prioritise different pieces of functionality and get rid of bugs in our product that were annoying our customers, it was a very challenging conversation every day and it took up so much time because I did not understand what he was talking about. He might as well have been speaking a different language. The chasm one has to cross if one has no technical background is massive. The earlier we can get people to have fluency in the language of technology the better, even if they do not end up becoming coders or developers in order that they can understand what is happening in a tech-driven business. Technology and data science should be foundational degrees for those who want to build companies. We should consider this very strongly.

We do not have many great role models for successful Irish female entrepreneurs. We have Anne Heraty of Cpl who is on my advisory board and Susan Spence of SoftCo. In a couple of years we will have more role models because some great companies such as Restored Hearing, Pharmapod, Beats Medical and Love & Robots are coming up. They are breaking down barriers in terms of the innovations they are bringing to the market and the role models of female-led companies coming out of Ireland and going on to make it big. Within a couple of years and with more of the support we have been giving them these companies and many more about which we have not heard will fill the gap and be the role models. It is very exciting.

It is very interesting that, anecdotally, Enterprise Ireland and others are reporting that it is women at middle management levels who tend to come out and become entrepreneurs. We can increase and accelerate this trend and encourage women by giving them an insight into how business works, encouraging them to fix problems that they see in their organisations and perhaps receive support from their organisations for spin off companies and bring them back in-house later. This is an opportunity for us. These women are smart and in the “superwoman” phase of their careers, when they probably have children who need them and elderly parents, as well as being at the apex of their careers. Given that they are superwomen, perhaps they can spin out and build companies if they receive enough support and enthusiasm. Given that they are already doing it, the question is how we can help them to continue.

This is a wonderful time. The trends are all positive and the funding and supports are in place. While there are cultural and environmental issues, they apply across the board and if we keep up the level of awareness and the Government talking about start-ups, we will be doing very well. We want to keep hearing the Taoiseach talk about start-ups and the potential of great, innovative, domestic companies to build strong businesses for Ireland in global markets.