Fifteen years ago came the first staging of an annual business event that would quickly become both outstandingly successful and keenly awaited every year. For both seasoned business leaders and those seeking to emulate their successes, The Entrepreneur Experience is unique. It returns to Ballymaloe House Hotel on October 16-17, with entries now open.

Once again, The Currency will be the media partner for an event that has been organised and managed from the beginning by AxisBIC. Other partners for the two-day gathering include Cork City Council, Cork County Council, Broadlake and Quintas Capital.

The idea of The Entrepreneur Experience is simple, but all the better for that. Bring 24 people at various stages of the entrepreneurial journey into the same room as 24 business leaders who’ve been there, done that and who still bear the scars of what that demanded of them. Then you match them up, so that the emerging entrepreneurs have a mentor for two days – but often the bond and the support doesn’t end when the cars pull out of Ballymaloe.

For many of those who attend, it can be a transformational couple of days. And almost everybody is astonished by how quickly barriers come down and honesty kicks in.

You could try to explain the success of the event by using numbers – 355 emerging entrepreneurs have taken part, mentored by 155 leaders, with €500 million raised by participating start-ups – but that is not the kind of language that tends to be used over the two days in Ballymaloe.

“Your problems aren’t unique”

Instead, the people taking part use words like “trust” and “openness” and describe an atmosphere in which people who are trying to break through in business find that they can allow themselves to be vulnerable – after a very short time in the same room as other participants. Sometimes, there can be tears, because building a company is almost always hard.

There’s a reason for the letting go of inhibitions and frustrations that people arrive with. Much of it comes down to the gentle encouragement of those who recognise what they’re witnessing, because they’ve been through it themselves at various stages in their own business careers.

“Don’t think that your problems are unique – they’re not. We’ve all experienced them in our own start-up journey,” the entrepreneur and investor Patrick Ryan said last year.

As a first-time attendee in 2025 and a non-entrepreneur, the honesty was the thing that struck me most. A business publication like The Currency frequently tells success stories that major on multi-million euro investment rounds and lucrative exits, but what you don’t tend to read about so much is the blood, sweat and tears that precede such happy outcomes. Even less so, the doubts and faltering self-belief that can sometimes creep into people’s psyches when things are at their hardest.

All of that and more comes to the surface when participants in The Entrepreneur Experience tell it like it really is.

“There’s something very different about when all these people come into a room,” says Susie Kilcoyne, founder of the e-commerce platform Locket, who took part in 2025.

Oran O’Flynn, CEO and co-founder of Talio, an AI-powered consumer tech company, put his finger on the dynamic at that gathering: “Once one person mentioned their problem, everyone was like, ‘OK, I can tell my problems too.’ Because I think it’s the easiest thing in a start-up to say that everything’s going good.”

That was another thing that struck me. All of the emerging entrepreneurs were asked at the outset to go on stage and give a very brief summary of what their idea was. Some of those who delivered their pitch with the most fluency and apparent confidence were later to be found unburdening themselves. And that frustrated passion felt far more real.

For the organisers, AxisBIC, the experience is all about giving those selected access to a powerful network of collaboration and innovation, but in an atmosphere very different to a typical networking event.

Long-time supporter

David McKernan, who built and later sold the hand-roasted coffee brand Java Republic, has been a long-time supporter of the event. “I’ve never seen honesty build up so fast in a group of people who’ve never really met each other,” he said of last year’s event. He attended with his son Greg, an aspiring entrepreneur in the food business.

I interviewed McKernan on stage and his story was so compelling that the audience gave him a standing ovation at the end. Here was the entrepreneurial journey told warts-and-all – all the mistakes made along the way, the nightmare of near-bankruptcy, and then, finally, the happy ending. We met up again a few weeks later and McKernan went into even more hair-raising detail in an interview for The Currency.

Before the 2025 event got going, I spoke to Patrick Magee, CEO and co-founder of Wiistream, which offers live-streaming and content management solutions to sports organisations. There was a touch of nervousness in the room as people chatted politely over coffees and teas. Magee was wondering how he’d get on with the seasoned entrepreneur he’d been paired with, the ShinAwilL founder and CEO Larry Bass.

Afterwards, his verdict was emphatic: “It’s hard to put into words just how valuable the experience was – part bootcamp, part therapy, part pure inspiration. Larry Bass was nothing short of brilliant. Larry shared the real highs and lows of building ShinAwiL and the honesty, insight, and humility he brought to every conversation was something special.”

A few weeks ago, the Louth-based founder of My Forever Tooth Fairy, Emma Duffy, was named as that county’s emerging businesswoman of the year by Network Ireland.

Duffy was one of the 2025 cohort in Ballymaloe. Another striking statistic is that over the past five years, an average of 48 per cent of the emerging businesses at the event were founded or co-founded by women. Duffy admitted in the last session of the weekend that she had spent a lot of time “in the weeds”, trying to juggle a lot of moving parts.

That session was chaired by Peaches Kemp, co-founder of Itsa Bagel and other food companies. Near the end, Kemp asked the emerging entrepreneurs what they were going to do differently, starting on Monday morning.

“Without thinking,” recalled Duffy, “I said, “I’m going to sit in my chair and finally believe that I belong there.’” I was sitting across from Duffy and it was obvious her words had struck a chord with everyone in the room.

In October, there will be more honesty like that, as a new cohort of emerging entrepreneurs descends on Ballymaloe.

Applications for the 2026 Entrepreneur Experience – organised by Axis BIC in partnership with Cork City Council, Cork County Council, Broadlake, Quintas Capital and The Currency – can be made here.