Just as Phil Libin (Evernote CEO) said, starting your own enterprise is about changing the world. Changing the world in a good way. But is it really that simple to change the world?
The first DICE Conference`getstarted16` took place in the Helix on the DCU Campus on the 8th of November 2016 and aims at giving us an idea and inspiration about how to successfully start our own business. My own opinion about entrepreneurship was ambivalent: On the one hand it´s great to be your own boss but on the other hand I believe entrepreneurship is based on a big risk you need to take in order to successfully set up a start-up. I was looking forward to gaining a further understanding of how to start a business.
The conference started off with a member of the DCU Ryan Academy and Paddy Quinlan their Accelerator Coordinator. DCU Ryan is a collaboration between the Dublin City University and the family of Tony Ryan (founder of Ryanair), one of the countries most successful entrepreneurs.
The DCU Ryan Academy offers various workshops, mentoring and networking programs as well as demo days or guest role models to support start-ups in various ways. Examples:
Propeller is a privately funded accelerator programm investing in ambitious teams. 
DCU UStart supports DCU students in accelerating their entrepreneurial development.
Followed by a short introduction of Andrew Keogh, the host of the conference, the first guest speaker came up.
Story of differentiation: Philippe Brodeur
Philippe Brodeur is the CEO and Founder of OvercastHQ and he told us the story of differentiation, of how to stand out.
He attracted my attention by telling a story about his son, who plans on studying International Business and wants to differentiate himself by going abroad. This is exactly the same thing I´m doing, trying to stand out by studying abroad.
After this introductory story, he compared the example of Youtube with winning the lottery. According to him the reality is different: He stressed that there´s not only up`s (youtube), but also many downs on the way to success.
In accordance with Bill Gross, Mr. Brodeur pointed out 5 reasons why a start up succeeds.
The most important one: Timing – You need to know when the market is right, when you can get into the market.
He continued by talking about his own company, OvercastHQ. It´s the first cloud based video asset management platform designed to make sharing, storing, distributing and collaborating on videos easier. The cloud `saves up to 90% of workflow time on rudimentary tasks as well as 50% of costs`. Bearing in mind our era of personalization it´s essential to `manage video files as easily as you might manage word documents` (overcasthq.com).
The effectiveness of his idea was clearly visible, even though I think from an individual point of view, nowadays there are much more possibilities to format or share a video. There are also many other cloud services that might be more convenient to use – in my case the Google Drive. However, a company can privately and securely share videos with colleagues, clients and stakeholders and even comment or approve versions, which can definitely contribute to optimizing the work processes.
Personally speaking, Mr. Brodeur`s speech delivered me a good insight into how long and difficult the road to success is, which confirms with my expectations about becoming an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurial rollercoaster: Brian O´Rourke and Alan Farrelly
Next up on stage was Brian O´Rourke. He is the CEO and Co-founder of CitySwifter and together with his college Alan Farrelly he gave us a speech about his experiences in setting up a business through the DCU´s Ryan Program UStart.
Having graduated from DCU in 2014, he gave us some valuable advice in terms of the requirements for a start up: A shared vision. Just like Peter Senge defined it in his book `The Fifth Discipline` : `..a shared vision is the answer to the question, “What do we want to create?“`.
Therefore O´Rourke advised us to take advantage of the networking possibilities here at DCU and socialize ourselves.
`Transportation is the center of the world! It is the glue of our daily lives. When it goes well, we don't see it. When it goes wrong, it negatively colors our day, makes us feel angry` - Robin Chase
The idea of CitySwifter targets the commuters. It´s to create a sustainable and shared bus transport option mainly for Dublin and its suburbs. With the aid of a mobile App passengers can search for a bus route and match with other passengers in their area.
I personally really like the idea of finding more efficient ways to regulate the city transport as this is huge problem in nearly all cities around the world.
Nevertheless, they pointed out their various setbacks before finally establishing the CitySwifter concept. Mr. O´Rourke and Mr. Farrelly referred to the so-called `entrepreneurial rollercoaster`: It´s important to always stay positive and learn from mistakes – failures can sometimes be the best thing that could happen to you. This is something I want to keep in mind.
CitySwifter itself benefited from the Dublin bus strikes: Even though this came quite unexpected, they managed to make the technology work and as a result many people gave them good feedback.
In my opinion this is one of the characteristics of entrepreneurship: The business is not always in the cards, sometimes there might be an unexpected opportunity. Just be ready, know your competitors and take advantage of a market change – it can bring you from 0 to 100.
Their high ambition to disrupt the current transport system definitely augurs success, even though I couldn’t totally understand what makes them stand out from other bus services available to book online. All in all I found their vision very fascinating as the transport system is very dynamic and something that affects everybody so that it necessarily needs to be revolutionized over the next decades.
Creating experiences: Elva Carri
The third guest speaker of this conference was Elva Carri.
She appeared to be 
a very dynamic and ambitious entrepreneur and what struck me in the beginning of her speech, was not only that she´s the first female entrepreneur of the evening, but also that she built a tech business without being a `techie`.
Her idea is as simple as brilliant: She wants to counteract the epidemic of loneliness and its serious impact on persons lives, due to the fact that it is an omnipresent phenomena at all ages and mainly for women.
Her start up called GirlCrew aims at socializing women with other women in their local area. With their slogan `The easiest way to make new friends` ,they encourage women to go out and live their lives, which is what makes GirlCrew stand out from conventional social networks: While conventional social networks (Facebook, Instagram..) encourage people to share amazing experiences, GirlCrew focuses on creating them offline by meeting people in real life.
It all started when Elva Carri wanted to go dancing but no-one of her friends had time. As a result she changed her Tinder profile to male and started asking others if they want to go dancing. After 24 hours there were more than hundreds of responses. So she created a Facebook group and without her involvement the people in the group created the first event. This can be put down to Israel Kirzner`s entrepreneurship: Mrs. Carri didn’t really bring along her own resources, she rather had the alertness to take advantage of `gratis potential` as the people organized the event themselves within a couple of minutes and it´s scalable for free (no advertising/Facebook).
In the course of the time Ms. Carri and her team have made GirlCrew a fruitful business:
- 50.000+ members all over the world
- Dublin group has over 10.000 members
- Taking part in many international business conferences (meeting with Mark Zuckerberg) –> Facebook stories even posted a video of GirlCrew
In accordance with her motto `Don´t just share experiences, create them` GirlCrew aims at spreading all over the world in urban areas and developed regions.
I believe, one can safely say that this is just the beginning for GirlCrew. In my opinion it definitely has the potential to conquer the world and the dynamic and lively presentation of Elva Carri inspired me to never exclude anything in terms of the job.
Making transport more efficient: Gavan Walsh
The next speaker was Gavan Walsh, the CEO and Founder of iCabbi.
Gavan Walsh illustrated us the different facets of entrepreneurship as he had started many unsuccessful businesses before finally setting up iCabbi. 
At the age of 19 his cousin had the idea to sell Christmas trees and make money. It worked: They bought Christmas trees and went from door to door to sell them for more money.
He stressed the `point of no return` – it either leads to success of to nothing at all, there´s no going back.
Finally, in 2009 when he was lost in a town without finding a taxi, he came up with the idea of making the taxi industry a better one.
So Gavan Walsh launched iCabbi in 2010. iCabbi is a world leader in dispatch technology.
In collaboration with taxi companies from Dublin he built a proper dispatch system into a cloud making transport more efficient.
Having experienced many setbacks (e.g introduction of the system in UK market), Walsh managed to make his start up successful.
In contrast to Uber, iCabbi works directly for traditional taxi companies and aims at providing them a higher flexibility and stability in a difficult time, where they lose more and more market share and are regarded as old fashioned.
For the future iCabbi wants to become the global leader in taxi dispatch. Furthermore, the iCabbi dispatch system has been used to make the transport of goods more efficient (construction company) and has partnerships with subway (provide a delivery system) and MTM . This shows that the dispatch system has endless possibilities and is not limited to the taxi industry.
I enjoyed Gavan Walshs` presentation due to the fact that in my opinion he epitomizes the entrepreneurial spirit: Even though he experienced many failures, he never gave up and took many risks in order to finally become a successful business man. His start up has already disrupted the market and now has the ambition to become a global player.
For my future, I want to keep his devotion to the business in mind and remember that you have to overcome obstacles in order to become successful.
Revolutionizing the recruitment process: Adrian Mihai
The next guest on the stage was the only non-Irish entrepreneur and first real `techie`of the evening: Adrian Mihai from Romania, living in Dublin. He´s the CTO and Co. Founder of opening.io.
`Behind the anxiety lies the fear of being unneeded`
Mr. Mihai used this quote to encourage us to start something and not be afraid.
His start-up opening.io is a software for recruitment that benefits both, the companies as well as applicants for jobs. The problems in terms of recruitment are obvious:
For some job adds companies receive thousands of responses from applicants which consequently takes days to evaluate (2-3 hours for one candidate). Overall, it takes month to actually hire people, even though companies might need new employees right away.
Making computers understand CV´s (like Siri on the iPhone) leads to fantastic results:
The algorithm automatically matches the candidates from a job board with the the job adds like a job data base.
This definitely revolutionizes the whole system of recruitment processes and due to that can be seen as an example of `Creative Destruction` (Joseph Schumpeter) – it deconstructs the long-standing arrangements of job application.
In the end of his speech he encouraged us to network and consequently find 2-4 like-minded people.Connected to that, he emphasized the importance of communities as they create a sense of togetherness, which might be important bearing in mind that according to him in the beginning the only goal is to `survive`.
I found Mr. Mihai`s speech very interesting and I believe that his technical skills make the start-up grow more and more. In addition, optimizing recruitment processes is a very current and contentious issue due to the fact that it saves lots of time and money. Nevertheless, I expect that it takes time until the system of opening.io with its algorithms actually takes over the recruitment process of firms. It seems futuristic to replace humans with artificial intelligence in order to recruit people. At the same time a mix of both AI and humans could be the perfect solution: Algorithms are used to execute a first preselection of the applicants followed by a personal interview with an employee of human resources.
Social entrepreneurship: Iseult Ward
Iseult Ward, the last speaker of today´s conference, illustrated us another type of entrepreneurship: Social entrepreneurship.
Ward is Co Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Foodcloud. In contrast to all the other businesses we got to know today, Foodcloud does good stuff without aiming at making profit.
`Connecting those who have too much food with those who have too little`
It was an Enactus project that inspired Ward and her Co Founder to do something against the serious problem of food waste: On the one hand, tons of perfectly edible food are thrown away everyday, whereas on the other hand millions of people (795million) don’t actually have food. Ward identified this discrepancy and started off with her idea.
Having failed in the first place, she approached supermarkets – one of the biggest food wasters. She was able to convince a Dublin Tesco store to take part in her project. A foodcloud App enabled the Tesco store manager to upload the amount of surplus food – linked to that is a charity which is, informed by the app, able to pick up the surpluses from the Tesco store.
In the following years many more supermarkets (contracts with Aldi..) joined the food cloud project, making it bigger and bigger with remarkable results:
- 1.075 retail stores
- 5million+ meals for people in need
- 95 food industry partners in Ireland
Tesco now even approached food cloud to establish their system in the UK Tesco stores as well.
For the future foodcloud wants to expand globally: Mainly the US provides a great opportunity as the food waste is a massive problem overseas.
I think Ward`s speech was very inspiring due to the fact that she did exactly the thing I started my blog with: Changing the world in a good way. Her brilliant idea tackles one of the most serious problems on earth that has been there for many years: Food waste.
I like how the idea of starting the business came up, as I´m a member of Enactus myself. This made me even more encouraged to participate actively and try to make a difference myself. Furthermore, it was interesting to get an insight into a self financing enterprise that has the mission to create and sustain social value rather than wealth-creation.
In conclusion, for me the speeches were very fascinating and inspiring. I learned that entrepreneurship is multifaceted and consequently a tempting field of work. However, the speakers also confirmed my expectations of entrepreneurship: It´s a lot of hard work and it´s nearly impossible to not meet with failure at any stage of the business development.
From a personal point of view the conference encouraged me to remain open-minded towards becoming an entrepreneur. When I have a business idea there are many great organizations like the DCU Ryan Academy which offer honest and productive feedback in order to help me with my plans. But even if I wont become an entrepreneur this conference was very informative about the business world out there, in particular in terms of motivational competencies like passion and intentionality. With regard to my applications for the Internship next year, I will keep in mind the positivity of the speaker even if something doesn´t work out in the first place
Floriansdiceblog 