20VC: The Three Fundamental Forces in Society with Ciaran O'Leary, Partner @ BlueYard

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2016

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ciaran O'Leary is the General Partner at one of Europe's newest funds, BlueYard. A $120m fund located at the early stage, centring around 3 key areas: The decentralisation of markets, the democratisation of capabilities, and the liberation of data. Prior to BlueYard, Ciaran was a Partner at Earlybird with investments in the likes of Peak Games (emerging markets social gaming), 6Wunderkinder (productivity apps), Moped (private messaging), B2X Care Solutions (outsourcing platform), madvertise (mobile targeting network) and simfy (digital music distribution company). Before Earlybird, Ciarán co-founded a startup and gathered operational experience at others.

We would like to say a special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data used in the show today and you can check out Mattermark Search here!

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Ciaran made his way into startups and the investing industry?

2.) What is the thesis with BlueYard? What is the preferred cheque size, sector and geography?

3.) With the mass of VCs emerging, how can startups at the early stage determine whether a VC really is early stage? Are there any defining characteristics?

4.) For startup founders out there who always hear from fellow founders that everything is going gangbusters, how should they react to that? How can you determine whether a startup really is doing well?

5.) Say the startup really is going well and they are looking to scale and hire, we always hear we need a world beating, world class X? How can they communicate that hire better to their current team and their board? What should the CEO or Head of Talent be focusing on when viewing talent? Is there anything they should look out for in particular?

6.) Now when a startup really scales, board meetings become a big part of a CEO’s life. So how can CEO’s turn useless board meetings into very useful value added meetings? How can they optimize that time? What should they look for? What should they ask for?

Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:

Ciaran's Fave Book: The Road

Ciaran's Fave Blog: The Economist Espresso

As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Ciaran on Twitter here!

If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the 20 minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings and I hope you enjoyed the previous interview with the amazing Matt Mazio.
0:07.3	And for the first time ever you can listen to behind the scenes footage of my conversation with Matt,
0:12.3	basically all the hardcore opinions that were too raw to go into the main edit, to be quite honest.
0:17.4	And you can get that simply by signing up to the newsletter on the 20 minute VC.com.
0:22.3	And today we are back on the other side of the pond to speak to another mover and shaker of
0:27.1	the VC industry with Kieran O'Leary, partner at Blue Yard, joining me today. Now, Blue Yard is one of
0:33.5	Europe's newest funds with $120 million under management and an investment thesis that is
0:38.8	encapsulated around the decentralisation of markets, the democratisation of capabilities
0:44.2	and the liberation of data. However, Kieran will explain this much better and in much more detail
0:49.0	in the show, I have no doubt. But prior to Blue Yard, Kieran was also a partner at Early Bird with investments in the
0:55.5	likes of Peak Games, Wunderlist, who you might remember we had Chad Fowler, CETI, Wunderlist on
1:01.1	the show previously, Moped, and many more incredible companies. Also, if you have not had a chance
1:06.9	to check out the official Sasta podcast, brought to you by Jason Lempkin and I, then that is a must
1:13.0	and you can find it by searching for Saster on iTunes. And finally, we would like to thank the amazing
1:17.9	folks over at Mattermark, as always, providing the best data and powering the analysis behind
1:23.3	the 20 minute VC. And if you haven't done so so already you've got to sign up for Mattermark
1:27.5	Daily the best curation of startup and VC articles and resources however it's now time for me to hand
1:33.6	over to one of Europe's newest funds may I present Kiran O'Leary general partner at blue yard You have now arrived at your destination.
1:48.7	Kieran, welcome to the 20 minute VC. Thanks so much for joining us today.
1:52.3	Thank you for having me.
1:53.8	First, I have to say a huge thank you to Chad Fowler for making the intro and making this interview possible.
1:58.9	But now I'd like to start off by hearing a bit about
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Twenty Minute VC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Twenty Minute VC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.