Paddy's Valley is dead. Long live Paddy's Valley

What a cool endorsement of Paddy's Valley from Havi Hoffman at Yahoo! - "Despite the fact that many of these startups compete for mindshare and funding, they figured that by banding together on a "trade mission" they could create a more likely scenario for being seen and heard. I found this example of purposeful real-world networking almost as intriguing as the business plans and product demos I saw... the distinctly collaborative, emergent approach for gaining the attention of busy business leaders seemed almost as innovative as the product pitches themselves."

And now that they're shaking off the jetlag we're getting a nice roundup of reviews from the Paddys themselves. Anton Mannering has been inspired to propose the Shared Knowledge Society. "The most powerful thing I learned about Silicon Valley was not it’s concentration of VCs and Technology companies but how it’s massively open culture affects those groups of people and led to an environment where investors, entrepreneurs and the general community know (or can easily access) information about what is going on in any particular space. A place where respect is gained for having a go, and where knowledge, contacts and info are shared with ease. The attitude is not, “I’ll help you because you’ve already done it” (why would you need it then anyway), it’s more “I’ll help you because you might be the next big thing”, which from a business perspective is a far more intelligent way of looking at the world, especially when you consider the CEO of the hottest company in the web space right now is only 23 (Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook).

So I pose a challenge to the Irish Technology community. Let’s build the same thing here. Starting Dublin on the 24th-ish January and the third thursday of every month thereafter.

Alexia Golez expands on a number of take away points from her trip to the Valley. Two of the headings are - "Networking is like breathing", and "Failure is a rite of passage."

Shane Mc Allister boils it down to "access and openness". "Incredibly, here’s a list of the companies we managed to meet in one week - Facebook, SocialText, Meetro, Microsoft, Google, The MileStone group, Ning, Twitter, Meebo, Yahoo, United Layer, WSGR, Loopt - and that’s not counting the various other individual meets ‘n’ greets arranged by members of the group."

Damien Mulley was thrilled by the amount of talent and drive he saw in the Paddy's Valley group and hopes also that we can keep the momentum going here at home - "It was a pleasure to spend my week with them and I really hope that they make Paddy’s Valley redundant by doing their own versions and dragging people over. I hope they evangelise how people in the Valley operate and maybe inject their enthusiasm into Irish culture. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Paddy’s Valley idea wasn’t in anyway special and something that happens a lot?"