WILD GEESE:Barry Cassidy, founder of social discovery application Speeksy.com
IT WAS simple wanderlust that inspired Barry Cassidy to leave Ireland. After a career that has taken him through the highs and lows of California’s boom and bust economy, he is ready to take on the world of social networking.
Cassidy headed to Chicago with an electronic engineering degree from DCU in the early 1990s. There he cut his teeth developing point-of-sale software for a Japanese company.
His choice of destination was a simple one: “I had family there so I decided to go,” he says. “I was so clueless about America that I didn’t realise how far it was from Chicago to California.”
When the dotcom bubble began to expand, Cassidy was drawn by the promise of high wages and the lifestyle, so he moved to San Francisco. “There were a lot of crazy things going on back then. I worked for one company that got $40 million in funding from a major investment firm and never generated a single cent in revenue.”
With hindsight, those caught up in the bubble have been made to look foolish but, for talented software developers such as Cassidy, it was a time of rich pickings. “In the space of one year I got four salary increases,” he remembers. “All you had to do was tell the owners you were going to leave and they’d give you a salary increase. Money was no object.”
But he soon learned what happens when businesses lose sight of the bottom line. Over two years, three companies he worked for went bust. With the end of unlimited capital came the return to reality. Cassidy settled down to a staff job at Macromedia, later taken over by Adobe, where he worked on developing video conferencing software. In 2010, he spotted a niche in the social networking market.
Thinking back to the early days of social networking, he looked at the models created by Myspace and Friendster, which were all about meeting new people. Facebook reshaped online networking with its focus on privacy. All of a sudden, social networking was about keeping in touch with people you already know, rather than reaching out to like-minded strangers.
“So the only way to meet new people online was through online dating,” said Cassidy. “That’s been around for 15 years in the same contrived, stale format. I saw the potential of the early social networks and their less contrived way of introducing people, and I also saw the potential of video conferencing technology to create environments that were more conducive to immediate chemistry and attraction dynamics.”
With funding from friends and family of about $60,000 and savings, he began developing the software for his site in a small office at his home in San Francisco’s Mission district.
“We want social discovery to become as seamless a part of people’s lives as Facebook is today. In the next two to five years social discovery will be how people meet new people online. Online dating will no longer own this market.”
A beta version of his website, speeksy.com, is live but enhancements are being made. By this autumn it will be a platform for social interaction.
Cassidy is working on software that will allow real-time video uploads from mobile phones that can be viewed by other people in your area who have similar interests. So if you’re at a gig, pub, poetry reading or a party in the park you can shout out to like-minded individuals and let them know what’s going on.
At the other end, if you're looking for something to do, you go to speeksy.comand search for users in your area and find something that might be of interest. When something catches your eye, you can message people who are there or simply get out and join them.
Another part of the site will showcase virtual clubs, pubs, discos, cafes and venues where people can meet and get to know one another through instant messaging and live video chat. Connections will be suggested using common interests pulled from Facebook profiles and users will be able to post short videos about their favourite films, music, television shows, venues, pets and so on, and have them beamed immediately to others who share their tastes. It is here that the site gains part of its revenue, by offering users greater upload capability in return for payment.
Having seen the best and worst of Silicon Valley’s excesses, Cassidy has some advice for Irish graduates considering making the move. “There is no other place in the world where you can make as many connections or contacts in the tech industry as you can here,” he says. “The downside is that there are so many companies that there is huge competition. No matter what you are doing, there is someone else in Silicon Valley doing the same thing or something similar.”
Therein lies a possible niche for young entrepreneurs in Ireland.
Ideas that germinate in Silicon Valley often turn into global enterprises but a savvy young software developer could spot trends here and bring them to Ireland before their inventors get a chance to expand that far.
