This morning, the Synergy Centre IT Tallaght, hosted one of its monthly thought-sparking breakfasts in its Juice series.  The series is aimed at bringing industry experts, successful entrepreneurs, and buddging entrepreneurs together to share ideas and experiences.

The event starts with coffee and pastries and networking, followed by presentations, Q&A, wrap-up and more networking.  Many of the M50 clients are attendees - some at the very early stage of developing their business concept. 

The Synergy Centre itself is another great centre sponsoring innovation and entrepreneurship in the city.  They also run another series - Brown Bag Lunches: a one hour pitch, Q&A and information exchange.

The two presentations today were:

Investee Perspective: Colm Saunders, Finance Director, Zamano
Colm qualified as a chartered accountant with KPMG, and then worked in Corporate Finance for Charterhouse in London and NCB in Dublin. While at NCB Colm raised over €75m in funding for high growth companies. Colm became General Manager for Spectel Inc. based in Boston, which grew quickly to become the audio conferencing market leader, and was then sold to Avaya Inc for $100m. Colm led the integration of Spectel into Avaya, and became Director of Strategy and Operations before joining the Board of zamano plc in October 2007 as CFO. While at zamano, Colm has put in place €15M in debt funding, completed two acquisitions and the Company’s EBITDA has grown by 100%.

Investor Perspective: Drew O’Sullivan, Investment Mgr, 4th Level Ventures
Drew is a former Manager of the Genesis Enterprise Platform Programme in Cork and has worked in Nova UCD as Project Manager. Drew joined 4th Level Ventures in 2007 Where he works with technology based businesses with high potential for growth on finance and fundraising, new product introduction and IP protection, business models, team development and export market entry.

Some very useful tips and shared experiences.

Don't even think of applying for 4th Level Ventures funding unless you have a killer proposition!  Very demanding criteria but great to hear that there are start-ups out there with global application, an addressable target market of €1b, a very significant competitive advantage.

Check out Drew Smith's very intersting presentation here.