Gaston Irigoyen

Almost every week, John Herlihy (VP of Global Ad Operations, Google Ireland) hosts meetings with interesting people in what’s internally known as leaders@google. Last week he invited Barry Maloney, Irish businessman and one of four General Partners at Balderton Capital (portfolio includes Bebo, MySQL, Betfair, Yoox & Yingli Solar among other high tech & Internet companies). I’d like to share the main ideas and stories from his Venture Capital firm:

- Balderton is trying to create an entrepreneur hub in Europe, until now most tech & online giants were born in Silicon Valley.

- Ireland is a great country for software development and customer support, terrible for marketing and sales. Most start-ups they back are moved to the US to scale.

- Many great companies are founded in the wrong time, in the wrong country, with the wrong management team. Only a few can be reshaped and succeed.

- 5 year plans don’t really matter, most entrepreneurs show “up and to the right” charts without knowing what will happen to their companies in 5 years, 99% of the times the original plan changes.

- Investment decisions are mainly based on the entrepreneur and the team (vision, personality, energy).

- Balderton lost Skype on Christmas Eve 2004. They had a verbal agreement but the founders wanted to stay out of the board, something that Balderton wasn’t willing to negotiate. Skype found another VC and 9 months later it was sold to eBay for $2.6 billion.

- Many other failures happened due to emotional engagement with the idea and/or the entrepreneur, “we are learning to exit at the right moment”.

Next week we’ll have Mary Robinson, first female President of Ireland (1990-1997), President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, and awarded with the Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in July 2009. I’ll keep you posted.

Maria Sipka (@mariasipka) is Linquia’s Founder & CEO.

A few days ago, she introduced me to her start-up by saying that: “Linqia is the first global online platform connecting advertisers and group leaders across social networks. Currently the marketplace reaches almost half a billion people in all countries across 243 social networks … our vision is to connect the developing world with the developed world through online communities and groups”.

They basically connect commercial partnerts (any company, brand, organization or individual who has something relevant and interesting to offer to social networks) with decision makers at the social networks, who can accept or decline each opportunity.

The main questions are whether commercial partners are willing to pay for this “connect us” service (I don’t see why not, it’s cheap and ROI could be huge), whether it become a strategic acquisition channel for social networks and whether the business model is scalable.

Thanks Maria & good luck!

Hi, welcome!

Well … after some time thinking and working on the blog, here’s my first post.

I won’t spend much time sharing a vision, defining a mision or stating a specific goal for the blog, mainly because I don’t have them. I only aim to post my thoughts and share interesting information (news, articles, videos, jobs, etc) that I may find or work on. The main topics will be online marketing, social networking & entrepreneurship but, as we all know, things change very quickly and new topics may arise.

As you probably won’t know me, here’s a brief description of my background: I hold a BA in International Relations (Universidad de San Andres, Argentina), I work as Media Sales Executive at Google (Dublin, Ireland) and I’m doing my first steps as Internet entrepreneur (more details to come). I’m also a big fan of skiing and other extreme sports such as bungy jumping and skydiving.

Last but not least, I encourage you to comment, provide feedback and suggest new subjects. I’m also available on Twitter (my tweets on the right hand side), Facebook, LinkedIn and other major social networks.

Thanks for reading & see you soon!

Gaston.