Leaving Cert students are currently looking at CAO options and attending open days all over the country. The usual path for university students is to complete their degrees and then head off into the corporate world, earning income for someone else. On this path, they will earn a stable income, potentially rise-up the ranks, and implement visions and strategies created by someone else.
For some graduates, who are willing to take a different route, and look to creating their own company however, the rewards can be significant. As a company founder you need an extensive array of skills, a good pinch of courage and sometimes a bit of luck.
One such MTU graduate is Stephen Wilson Downey, who has successfully started two tech companies. Stephen’s entrepreneurship journey started while completing culinary arts in MTU (then CIT) when planning on becoming a chef. As part of his studies, Stephen had to come up with a product innovation in the food area. Stephen’s innovation was around the area of “sous vide.” Sous vide is a cooking technique that involves vacuum-sealing food in a bag and cooking it in a precisely regulated water temperature. Stephen used this college project to enter a student competition, won a prize, and in the summer of 2015, continued the idea on the Student Inc. Programme at the Rubicon Centre.
Student Inc is a full-time 13-week student accelerator program based in the Rubicon centre. Throughout the summer Stephen attended training and mentoring sessions, worked alongside the other students on the programme as well as the entrepreneurs based in the Rubicon centre. By the end of the summer, Stephen had reached the conclusion that he would need €1.25m to get his business off the ground. So, Stephen decided to continue with his studies and completed a masters programme in MTU while looking at other start-up opportunities.
In 2017 Stephen co-founded Spéire, which provides a wide range of services including website design, graphic design, AI software development services, hosting & website maintenance, and security. Speire has a client list that includes SMEs, MNCs and public bodies. The success of Spéire caused its own problems as the team struggled to keep up with the maintenance of the growing number of website contracts they were signing. Stephen and his co-founders created a second technology company, AIP technologies. AIP has created a platform that can detect and correct errors on websites and has the capacity to fix errors saving programmers endless hours of searching for errors that can shut websites down.
So, what are the benefits of being your own boss? Like all start-up companies there will be ups and downs along the way, but there is an incredible sense of achievement in building a successful company, or two, in Stephen’s case. As well as financial rewards there are continuous learning opportunities and the creative freedom to try new things. Having co-founders helps as you can bounce ideas off each other and share concerns and worries. Leaving the final word to Stephen, I asked him if he knew at graduation what he knows now, would he do it all again and his answer was “Without a doubt. In fact, I probably would be much further along in where I want to be if I knew as much then as I did now. It’s a tough road for sure but it’s very rewarding.”
