Risks are manageable if you’re a large corporate, but it’s a huge ask if you’re a start-up. Start-ups need capital and for most of us in Ireland that means the banks.  If you do somehow manage to get approval for a loan or overdraft, they’re routinely requiring personal guarantees before handing over the cash. For small fry that means that if your business fails in a big way you could end up bankrupt and lose everything and be on the sidelines for 12 years.  With risks like that is it any wonder that young knowledge workers aren’t willing to try the entrepreneurship route?

In the USA you can be in and out of Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy in a year and get back on the horse. As importantly, your core family assets (house, car and household goods) are safe. While never to be entered into lightly, it’s almost regarded as a right of passage for the entrepreneur in training.

Banks need to get fair in their business lending and government needs to put a proper structure in place to manage the failures in a humane way if they want to see a real culture of entrepreneurship grow in Ireland.

I dug out my old order confirmation email and clicked on the link to Macromedia’s web store. I got redirected to the Adobe store login, where my old Macromedia login worked, and could go straight to my order history and not only re-download my purchase 4 years later, I could also view my license key! If only all online stored operated this way I’d shop online for software more often.

He (or his advisors) is exhibiting a strange naïveté about the ways of internet business for someone so successful in other areas. Geography is immaterial and operating costs are minimal so there’s lots of competition for eyeballs and wallets. Your business either needs to be either new, better or cheaper; and preferably at least two of the three. Bendunne.ie or his previous attempt tenderme.ie (also launched in the same way) is none of these.

Adverts.ie, an offshoot of boards.ie, crucially realise that the buyers don’t come unless there’s a large volume of sellers. The only way to get a large volume of sellers is if you have a large volume of buyers (like eBay), or you make it cheap enough that they’ll list there products on the off chance… Crucially by charging a fee bendunne.com are reducing the volume of sellers as who’s going to pay for a listing on a site with no track record? Adverts.ie makes it’s money by embedding Google AdWords advertising in the listings and allows anyone to list for free. They’re listing 1000+ items each day and generating serious traffic, and traffic = money.

IT staff, no matter how good, will never be CEOs of major corporations. The one exception, John Reid of Citicorp, just proves the point, because he got fired too. Therefore IT staff are useless employees and no good at being managers.

A friend of his gets paid way more than you’d expect for someone with no responsibilities, and reports direct to the CEO. Why? Because from time to time he saves the company from ruin. This is Cringely’s Door Number Three. The natural position for the IT personality in an organisation.

He sees this as a precursor of tomorrows corporate structure. IT staff are used to coming up with quick “good enough” solutions to rapidly evolving technical situations. The pace of change in the wider world is speeding up to match, so business structures need to change, with today’s IT departments, with their loose quasi-meritocracy structures being a possible solution.

From I, Cringely