Some of my favourite stories end with the phrase ‘its a small world’.

Growing up in Ireland, you kind of take it for granted that everyone knows everyone. As you travel and work internationally you realise how wrong that is. However, sometimes you stumble across a story or two that makes you think…

Here are some of my favourite ‘small world’ stories with an Irish Startup twist;

Mark Suster’s first startup was an Irish company 

 I told the story last night how when I set up my first company the seed investor was a pig farmer from Ireland. That is a true story. It helps that my first company was actually founded in Ireland!

I came across this by random  few years back when reading one of his posts on Angel Investors – I even bumped into on of his Irish co-founders David Palmer at a random tech event one day who told me all about the early days of their company BuildOnline. I found this funny as I love Mark’s posts and never knew there was such an Irish connection.

Chris Sacca went to UCC in Cork (for a semester)

Just listened to @tferris podcast with @sacca. At 1´10´´, how he planned it all flirting & drinking porter in @UCC https://t.co/60G0pENVbK

— Joe Haslam (@joehas) June 1, 2015

Not much more to say. I had heard this from a few people but in this podcast above he talks about the time he lived in Ireland and started drinking stout most days around 11.30 AM and figured out what he was going to do with his life!! Having also gone to UCC I could relate :)

Ron Conway sold his last startup to an Irish company

Ron conway is probably most famous for his Angel Investing career at SV Angel. Before SV Angel, he was CEO of PTS which was bought by CBT in 1995.  CBT was setup in Ireland and was one of the first European Tech companies to list on the Nasdaq. CBT was led by Bill McCabe who along with Ron went on to become seed investors in Datahug (16 years later).

He (Ron Conway) was the CEO of Personal Training Systems (PTS) from 1991 to 1995. PTS was acquired by (CBT later called) SmartForce/SkillSoft). (wikipedia)

I’m sure there are plenty more stories like that this out there and I’d love to hear them.

As I said, It’s a small old world :)