Éire Ventures
To apply for a grant, kindly go directly here.
Building Ambition.
Towards the end of their book, Talent, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross remark how it is possible to have an outsized positive influence… simply by raising someone else’s ambitions. It doesn’t cost much, and it doesn’t take much time, but it can have a large percentage effect.
Sep Kamvar’s short book - Syntax and Sage - speaks to the beauty of building. The ability to create makes life beautiful.
On the one hand, Éire Ventures is an initiative to build ambition - in the sense of raising ambitions. On the other hand, Éire Ventures is about promoting an ambition to build.
Logo
Imagine holding up a sheet of paper with two narrow horizontal slits that are spaced closely together. Now, imagine shining a laser on those slits such that a pattern is projected onto the wall behind. What do you see?
You won’t see two clean slits of light on the wall. Rather, a complex pattern emerges with repeating bands of shade and light - known as interference. You may imagine this happens because of interactions between the photons you observe. But… if you repeat this experiment one photon at a time, the same pattern emerges, i.e. there are lines of shade that are never struck by photons. There is something real that affects the path of individual photons, but it is not something we observe.
That something is described in quantum equations and is consistent with the theory that there are multiple parallel universes, but only one that we observe. This is the double-slit experiment and there is much that remains to be understood. These quantum phenomena underly technology today (we measure quantum spin effects when we get an MRI scan), and surely much more technology tomorrow (when can we usefully do quantum computing?).
In old Irish texts, there’s a way to write “and” that looks a bit like a seven. Using that seven as a repeating unit, I sketched out the logo above. The layers are reminiscent of the interference patterns from the double-slit experiment. They also loosely represent the three horizontal lines in the letter E, for Éire.
What is success for this initiative?
It’s measured by the number of people who are inspired to build.
A Roadmap for Éire Ventures
And now for a sketch of a potential roadmap for this project… beginning with publishing, moving on to a grants program and then potentially a business model.
A Website focused on raising ambition and building.
…with three underlying themes:
Serving an international market.
Focusing on revenue over investment.
Benchmarking off global standards.
I’ll begin to dig in on these starting from the next post - “Irish Startups can play at Silicon Valley's Level”.
You can subscribe to get posts by email, or, just come back to this site periodically to catch up.
A Grants Program.
The program might draw inspiration from Emergent Ventures, but implemented in micro-grant format (as I am piloting with Trelis AI Grants).
Small grants can go a long way because they:
Connect grantees with each other - building a stronger network.
Provide exposure for grantees and their projects - potentially far beyond the monetary value of the grant.
Encourage applications to raise their ambitions, which can have a positive impact even if they do not receive a grant.
A Funding Model
This website, and any potential grants program, will encourage and select for projects with a plan to become financial sustainable. Correspondingly, this initiative - Éire Ventures - should be financial sustainable.
There are a few approaches worth consideration, and I hope to consider more:
A paid subscription tier targeted towards investors. Potentially there might be a matching and introduction process for grantees and investors who opt in.
An AngelList fund. A fund could be established to support grantees who are seeking a larger financial investment than no-strings grants can offer. This does create an adverse pressure - at the margin - to encourage projects to take investment rather than driving revenue and profitability. Then again, there are projects where money is required, and this approach potentially provides a sustainable business model. My separate gripe with doing a fund is the typical 2% annual + 20% of profits in fees. Very often, this makes it impossible for investors to earn a return over the public markets. I’d like to think there may be ways - perhaps with a well designed process and distribution - to cut these fees substantially. Then again, there may well be good reasons why no-one else (?) has been able to undercut such fees in angel investing or venture capital.
Some asks:
If you have questions or suggestions - on the potential grants program or on the funding model - your comments, on this post OR by e-mail, would be appreciated. I’ve left below a list of questions I’m thinking about.
Cheers, Ronan
Questions to think about:
Grants program:
What are some online or in-person groups with latent (untapped) talent? In particular, what are such groups that are not well reached by other initiatives?
Funding model:
What other approaches might there be to sustain and grow a grants program?
What additional benefits might be provided to subscribers to a premium tier?
What issues might one foresee in the “Fund” approach and how might they be addressed?
