Andrew McCosker

Andrew is currently working within the digital strategy sector in the west of Ireland. He could never decide on which side of the country he liked the best, be it Galway or Dublin. Like the best Arts Graduates, who never want to settle on one subject, he became a hired gun across his passionate career paths, from horticulturist to cinema projectionist. He is now happy to have settled with the tech industry, an inexhaustible resource for learning, wonder and creativity. Yet he might just opt to talk to you about films and plants instead.
"I think the challenges are the same in many businesses from an entrepreneurial perspective: what am I trying to do, what's the product, what's the service, and it's also quite critical to work out if what I'm trying to do has been invented already or how am I going to improve on what's out there already."
Paul Duggan
TechShop
"People tell you that there is a renaissance in hardware but we actually think there is a renaissance in prototyping. This renaissance in prototyping is fuelling the renaissance in hardware, and it's because of the new materials available for hardware creating phenomenal opportunities around innovation."
Liam Casey
PCH
"Ireland's First Design & Hardware Hackathon was like no other event. It brought together makers, entrepreneurs, techies, designers and "IoT" innovators and united them with one common goal - to give birth to their cool ideas and prototype the next generation of connected hardware. Watch them in action now!"
"When you are a big guy like Apple every single marketing move you make is going to have effect on your stock price, by the end of the day you could be 50b richer or poorer, just on the basis of what you are doing, but when you are a small guy in a startup, you get to go out and try different logos, messaging and try selling to different niches."
DC Cahalane
Teamwork
"Your pitch is about explaining what you are doing, the problem and your product you have to solve it; market validation; how are you going to make money. It is going to involve doing the market research and doing the business development to get it air tight. So you have actually done an amazing amount of work by the time you have a solid pitch."
Conor McNally
ShotClip
"We didn't know we wanted to build a phone, we came up with a digital photo frame idea, a smartphone app and something related to a smartphone. We tested all three of them before they existed just with a landing page. And the landing page basically said: this is what we want to build, if you like it, give us your email address..."
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