The call came on a Monday morning from Ian Kehoe, co-founder of The Currency, a couple of weeks before I was due to start as Associate Editor. “Listen, feel free to say no, but would you be up for dinner and a night in Ballymaloe on Friday?” I’ve had worse offers.

Four days later, at 9 am, I was handed a lanyard saying ‘The Entrepreneur Experience 2025’ and walked into a bustling Ballymaloe Grainstore, knowing nobody. Thirty hours of privileged access to people being extraordinarily honest followed, something that’s increasingly rare in journalism today.

The idea behind the annual event is simple: put 24 emerging entrepreneurs on different stages of their journey into a room with 24 successful business leaders. Then see what happens when the start-up founders allow themselves to be vulnerable and the old hands don’t hold back on the honesty.

My job was to do an on-stage interview with one of the seasoned entrepreneurs, David McKernan, the founder of coffee business Java Republic. In 35 years as a journalist, nobody had ever said to me, before an interview: “Don’t spare me. Ask me absolutely anything you like – and go in as hard as you want.” I took McKernan at his word: more on that later.

The story of The Currency owes something to The Entrepreneur Experience, which is a big part of the reason why it’s now a media partner to the event, which is organised and managed by AxisBIC, in partnership with Cork City Council, Cork County Council, Grant Thornton, Broadlake, Quintas, The Currency and MediaHQ.

Ian and CEO Tom Lyons were part of the 2019 cohort. They knew plenty about breaking stories but not very much about running a business. They were mentored that weekend by serial entrepreneur Brian Crowley, a mainstay of the event, who was visibly moved when inducted into its Hall of Fame this year. That’s him with the medal in the picture below.

The class of 2025 began by introducing themselves on stage and giving their elevator pitches. Some were fluent, confident and pretty persuasive to this non-entrepreneurial interloper. Others seemed nervous, a little halting.

Read nothing into that, McKernan told me later. By all means, practise telling your story, but sometimes when people rattle off a perfect pitch, it’s because they’ve delivered it countless times – without ever getting funded.

Experienced investors like him aren’t swayed by sharp delivery; for them, it’s often about whether they can find evidence that the person behind the idea has the vision to execute it and the mental fortitude to survive the slings and arrows. Because being an entrepreneur is hard – and getting harder.

It was said more than once that Ireland is quite a risk-averse country, and that there isn’t a huge pile of investment money knocking around. But Kevin Canning, CEO of Quintas Capital (and son of RTÉ commentator Ger), pushed back hard against that. “There’s phenomenal wealth in Ireland – but if you’re a start-up you need to be absolutely top class to get significant finance.”

The experienced entrepreneurs – and the AxisBIC team – knew the value of the weekend for the people they were mentoring depended on cutting to the chase as quickly as possible, so the getting-to-know-you part was dispensed with in no time.

The two weekend captains – Barry Group’s Jim Barry and Chirp founder Rena Maycock – drove it forward with conviction and empathy. It was remarkable to me how quickly some of the budding  entrepreneurs went from breezy, confident pitch to admitting in the breakout sessions just a few hours later that they couldn’t sleep and had imposter syndrome. In a few cases, there were tears. As a journalist, to be allowed inside the room when that kind of honesty was coming through felt like a real privilege.

The emerging businesses that made it to Ballymaloe were profiled before the event in Emmet Ryan’s preview piece and it feels unfair to single any of them out here, but some of those who have attended the weekend every year since its inception said this was the strongest selection they’ve witnessed. For most of them, though, the biggest tests still lie ahead. As the entrepreneurial mentor Áine Denn put it: “Nothing happens until you sell something.”

With a little luck, at least a few will surely break through and make it, but it was clear in Ballymaloe that all of them are sparing nothing in the attempt.

If there was a theme, it might have been that you can learn more from failure than success. Colum O’Sullivan, of Cully & Sully fame, put it out there early: “Everyone makes the same mistakes.” Over the next day and a half, business leaders talked not so much about their stellar achievements and lucrative exits, but rather about the many, many ways in which they had screwed up before finding a way forward.

Which brings me back to David McKernan and a story of such brutal candour we agreed to meet again for an interview in The Currency. In a desperately difficult first year trying to get his business off the ground, he didn’t feel comfortable calling himself an entrepreneur – he hadn’t earned the right, he felt.

There was an echo of that in a breakout session I attended on Saturday morning, when the Itsa founder Peaches Kemp – another hugely empathetic presence – asked the early-stage entrepreneurs what they had learned from the weekend. What would they do differently when they got home? One of them, who had earlier admitted to the kind of self-doubt that was far from uncommon over the weekend, said she would sit at her desk on Monday morning and tell herself she deserved to be there. I thought it was the most impactful thing anyone had said all weekend.

McKernan got the kind of happy ending many of the people in that room were dreaming about – a perfectly timed exit and a number north of €30 million for the blood, sweat and tears that went into steering Java Republic through multiple storms.  

Come Saturday afternoon, like a lot of people, he was exhausted by the intensity of The Entrepreneur Experience, but also energised by it.