Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I’m not sure why, but TechCrunch thought this blog post was worthy enough to make it as a guest post. Azeem Azhar, the author, who I don’t know, complains about the necessity of filling in tax and VAT returns. My response is, get a bookkeeper and an accountant and focus on your business, instead of spending the time writing about not having time to perform such important tasks when running a business. To summarise, get on with it and stop complaining.

Most businesses go bust as a result of not managing cash-flow. My advice is to stay on top of your balance sheet and pay attention to tax returns to ensure you have enough in the kitty at the end of your financial year.

Here’s a blog post I wrote on the subject - the title says it all Entrepreneurs are not entitled to anything

Entrepreneurs in the slums of India don’t think they’re entitled to anything. They just get on with it.

Applications for the UK Young Interactive Entrepreneur award 2009 (UKYXE 09) close on 7 September!

This is a good opportunity to take part in a tour of the interactive industry in India and to join the British Council’s growing network of creative entrepreneurs.

Their definition of ‘interactive’ includes digital and interactive multimedia, leisure software publishers, developers and marketing specialists; entertainment developers for the internet, digital television, radio and mobile phones, internet and web design and experimental media.

To be eligible you must be aged 25-35, resident in the UK and with at least three years professional experience. For further information please visit their Web site.

In preparation for my talk in Greece tomorrow. A massive thanks to Eileen Brown from Microsoft for sending them across to my office on time.

This is a talk I’m very much looking forward to, not just because I haven’t been back to Greece since managing a cocktail bar on the party island, that is Ios, but because I’m dying to hear their story. I’m looking forward to hearing what the benefits and hurdles are in Greece for entrepreneurs generally and women in tech specifically. I’ve been asked to talk about ‘my story’ - which means I’ll talk about my career path and highlight the good and bad choices I made. You can read more about the event on the Greek Geek Girl Web site.

So, if you’re in Greece and are reading this, I look forward to meeting you. Please feel free to ask plenty of questions during and after my talk. You can leave questions on this post if you like and I’ll take them with me to answer on the night.

I’m getting tired of people on twitter coming up with stupid statement such as

I see your point. Still think wealth redist through tax is right when directed to those who really deserve.

What a load of bullshit. The people who are being subjected to horrendous tax are the people who earned the bloody money in the first place. If Bob didn’t earn enough to pay a lot of tax, he obviously doesn’t deserve to have someone else pay more tax on his behalf.

Some would say I should pay lots of tax because of the nice house, cars and lifestyle but lets not forget where I, like most, started. At one point in Dublin I lived in a flat that was literally infested with slugs, I had to put clingfilm across the widows because the draft was so bad and I had a crap diet because I couldn’t afford nice food. At that point, I learned how to touch type, yada yada yada, bought a computer on HP (which was a massive risk given the lack of money coming in) and I went out and handed my CV to just about every company in the city. At no point did I think I deserved anything better. Nor did I feel like someone else should pay lots of tax so I could have a better life. That comes with hard work and putting yourself in positions where you can get lucky. Luck doesn’t come to the fat ass sitting on the sofa watching the lotto every week.

So, to all you G20, tree-hugging twats who think people with high salaries should be subjected to extortionate taxes, think again. Better still, try harder yourself so you can end up in a high paying job. See if you complain then.

I wrote a post during the week entitled ‘Manufactured anger over the lack of women in tech‘. It was supposed to be a lead-up to my panel debate yesterday - which I was unable to attend due to viral tonsillitis which I still have. Hoping to numb my throat tonight with a few hot whiskys tonight.

Anyway, following on from my post, I emailed a few female friends who work in tech in its broadest sense. By that I mean, they don’t attend the usual networking events on the London scene. They’re not connected to most of my friends and they’re mostly not on Twitter. They are however, very powerful, very influential and very talented. All of them agreed with my previous post and my current opinion; there are fewer women in tech because fewer want to be in tech. That’s a very different reason to why there are only 3.8% women in boardroom positions within the FTSE 100 companies - figures taken from Management Today. I’m sure there are many reasons for the latter, some good and some bad. But we’re not debating women in business in general. We’re talking about women in tech.

Milo wrote a post on the Telegraph blog entitled ‘Men perform better in many technology jobs. Must we apologise for that?’. I don’t want to debate Milo’s headline. What I want to debate is the numbers game - i.e. why there are fewer women than men in tech.

The answer is probably the same as ‘why men perform better in the kitchen’. By that I mean, there are (ironically?) more male chefs working in the service industry than there are women. Furthermore, out of all the top chefs around the world (think of the TV chefs for example), the vast majority of them are men. What does that tell you? It tells you that more men than women want to be chefs. It doesn’t mean that women aren’t been encouraged to work in the kitchen - that’s proven by the fact that most home cooking is done by women.

Not only am I heavily involved in the StartUp community and not only have I been working in tech since my days at AOL in 1995, I own some restaurants in Dublin. So, I can at least commentate on the chefs debate

I’m on a TechCrunch panel tomorrow entitled ‘Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups’. I’m likely to be a little controversial, but then again, I’ve never been known to sit back and clap other panelists or speakers on the back for the sake of it. You never know, some of the panelists might agree with me - I won’t make assumptions.

It’s my opinion, which I’ll articulate tomorrow, that the books of males vs females doesn’t need to be balanced in favour of more females. Why? Well, because there are plenty of females in tech and those that aren’t, don’t want to be. Ok, so there might be a small percent who would like to be in tech, but don’t make it. But can’t the same be said for any industry?

Are we trying to balance the books to encourage more males to become nurses?

It’s panel discussions like this one that does little to help - they’re likely to do more harm than good by devaluing the females already in tech.

To sidetrack for a minute; it seems I’m being called into the female-tech world - I’m heading to Greece next week to give a talk about entrepreneurial stuff to over 100 geek women and I’ve been invited to give a talk to a group of convent girls about entering into the interactive industry. So I guess I get to speak to the before and after. More about the Greece talk next week.

To summarise, I think females are as likely to go into tech as males are to enter into the nursing profession. What do you think?

Yippee.

Quick.TV is quite possibly one of the smartest technology companies I’ve come across in a long time. In short, it’s a new platform that allows users to edit videos and make them interactive. It allows you to embed hyperlinks, forms and other smart features. I’ll write a more in depth piece when I’ve got a show reel.

Here’s the Red Herring list.

Disclaimer: I’m an Advisor.

I was asked by the FT to comment on the UK Government’s decision to increase business rates by 5% this morning. I’ve yet to do so because I’ve just learned about it myself.

Refusing to scrap the rise that’s 50 times the current level of inflation, will save the Government £1billion. This couldn’t possibly come at a worse time for business owners!

“Let’s push those close to the edge that bit further” is obviously the Government’s moto.

I launched a new events based startup last week and I’m launching an online marketplace for start-ups soon. I’m wondering if I should incorporate in a country that doesn’t try to rip us off.

I’m looking forward to hearing what Tom Watson has to say on the matter, as he asked what the Government should do to help small businesses on Twitter recently.