Paddy Dillion: Venture Capital Investment Associate at Elkstone

What is your background/ experience with ISCG and what are you currently doing?

I got involved with ISCG at the beginning of the final year of my Commerce degree as UCD's Project Leader.

ISCG appealed to me because I had lots of successful case study experiences from both student competitions and internships, and wanted to put my learnings into practice to help a real-world business solve a critical challenge they faced. I also had always romanticised the notion of helping to build an innovative, international business from the ground up, so when my friend Dave (ISCG President at the time) asked me would I lead UCD's project advising an early stage technology business on international go-to-market strategy, I relished the opportunity.

I assembled a multi-disciplined team of seven students and, after a comprehensive team effort that entailed months of thorough market research, creative thinking, problem-solving, a dose of healthy debate and a crash course in project management, we delivered a solution-driven approach that was actually radically different to what the company planned to do. The startup is still in business in that market so we couldn't have performed too poorly!

Now, I am a Venture Capital (VC) Investment Associate at Elkstone, where every day I get to meet the entrepreneurs shaping the next 10 years, while investing in game-changing early-stage technology startups and working with the founding teams post-investment to help scale these businesses internationally.

What did you enjoy most/find most beneficial about ISCG?

Before ISCG, all of my practical work experience had been at large companies such as KPMG, Matheson and A&L Goodbody where you are working on niche parts of projects that hold relatively little weight in the delivery of the ultimate overall project outcomes. With ISCG, we worked with a startup that had just raised €500,000 for the exact purpose of our project (to scale internationally). What we were working on was mission-critical to the company and, even if they ultimately decided to not take our advice, the possibility of contributing to a growth story like this through presenting to a CEO was something that greatly motivated me.

As I was in final year, ISCG was one of many things I was juggling, so looking back I definitely feel I learned some valuable lessons on prioritisation, project management and the importance of focusing on using a solutions-oriented approach to provide value in relatively little time with sometimes limited information. These lessons are still incredibly important to me in my job today, as in any given year I will likely read 500 investment decks, meet 100 entrepreneurs and invest in just 10 companies, so identifying the key information for providing the most valuable insights to make decisions is absolutely paramount to success in VC.

Finally, everyone I worked with in ISCG was bright, capable and proactive, so I learned a lot from both my teammates on the project and the rest of the executive committee. It was occasionally a good laugh too!

How do you think your experience with ISCG has helped you generally and/or in your career?

ISCG was brought up in my first round interview at Elkstone as it demonstrated clear interest in helping small businesses grow and an aptitude to problem solve and identify what could work for a startup to deliver success. After sharing the initial overview of what was achieved with ISCG, I was actually asked directly whether or not I would invest in the company we delivered our project to. I think at this point all of the hours dedicated to assessing and debating our client's product-market fit, business model and competitive landscape paid dividends as I could show my future employer how I would think about a prospective investment in a real-world context. Clearly it paid off as three interviews later I was Elkstone's first graduate hire on the Venture investment team! And no, I cannot disclose whether I said I'd invest or not!

After getting in the door, I quickly learned that the VC world is a steep learning curve as you're dealing with entrepreneurs who have put everything on the line to pursue their passion in the space of their expertise. Identifying what to look for in an investment deck, which questions to ask and why to ask them, while educating yourself enough on the space so you can hold an intellectually stimulating conversation about the industry the person across the table from you has spent 20 years in, is vital in VC and the experiences of asking the right questions of ISCG clients' data and your independent research can help prepare you for this. It definitely helped prepare me and made reviewing target companies' data rooms a little less intimidating the first few times!