What #StartupLokal Brought Home from Enterprise Ireland
Written up from #StartupLokal Meetup v.12: 1st Anniversary: Digital Heroes Go Global
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In March 2011 four of the people who started #StartupLokal flew to Dublin because an Irish state agency had asked them to come and look. Natali Ardianto, Aulia Halimatussadiah, Nuniek Tirta Sari and Sanny Gaddafi spent the trip at the NDRC, The Digital Hub and the Synergy Centre at ITT Dublin. Enterprise Ireland had been following the community from a distance, liked what it saw, and wanted to show the initiators the Irish version of the same thing in the hope that the two ecosystems would end up working together.
Kompas reported the visit on 23 March 2011, drawing on what Sanny wrote about it afterwards on his own blog.
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A state agency that starts at the startup
Enterprise Ireland was set up in 1998 to incubate companies inside every Irish university. It picks a company up while it is still a startup and stays with it: capital first, then the innovation itself, then a way into markets outside Ireland.
The programme the initiators came home talking about is High Potential Start Up, which is open to people living in Ireland. A company accepted into it gets working capital and a route to customers abroad, guided by the government directly and without the government touching how the company is run. Enterprise Ireland then reviews it on two questions: how far the innovation can actually be taken, and whether the company will put Irish people to work. The targets are ten employees within three years and at least one million euro of revenue in the same period.
What Sanny said made him envious was the shape of it. A state-owned company was backing local firms while they were still startups, getting directly involved, with no bureaucratic detour and none of the ceremony that usually comes first.
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They shout Export in the photographs
Ireland does not have Indonesia's natural resources, and Sanny's reading was that this is why the country teaches export to everybody. He wrote that the habit is planted so deeply in every resident that they shout "Export!" in photographs. He thought the High Potential Start Up guide would transfer, and that a government here could use something like it to get local startups growing.
Think global, act local
A few weeks later the community turned one. Meetup v.12 ran the whole of Saturday 9 April 2011, from nine in the morning until four, at fX Plaza on Jalan Jenderal Sudirman. The initiators used the day to report back from Dublin and to launch a book with the same title as the event, Digital Heroes Go Global. Kompas, Bisnis Indonesia, DailySocial and Yahoo News were among the outlets that covered it.
Enterprise Ireland sent someone. Patrick O'Riordan spoke, and two days later Kompas ran what he had said under the headline "Think Global, Act Local" Masih Berlaku.
His advice was about where a young company should point itself. "You have to analyse your market sector globally. For example, if you are in games or animation, you have to know how it is developing globally," he said. "Once you have that, you can apply it at the local level, in Indonesia. So you really have to think global, act local."
Act local, he said, because Indonesia has a domestic market worth having. His own country has 4.5 million people, which is why Irish startups are pushed to invent for global needs and to sell abroad. He went further than advice, too: he said it was not impossible that Enterprise Ireland would help develop promising Indonesian startups for the market here.
What came home
The trip came back as an incubator. Project Eden, the first in Indonesia, was started by Bernhard Soebiakto, Aulia Halimatussadiah, Natali Ardianto, Calvin Kizana, Kevin Mintaraga, Megain Widjaja, Andi Sadha and Nuniek Tirta Sari. Marissa Mayer brought a Google team to see it.
Sources
- Kompas, 23 March 2011, Melongok Pengembangan Startup di Irlandia
- Kompas, 9 April 2011, Setahun #StartupLokal Menjadi Katalis
- Kompas, 11 April 2011, "Think Global, Act Local" Masih Berlaku
