The seasoned businessman and angel investor Julian Costley had a question for the audience at Ballymaloe House Hotel in Cork last Saturday afternoon. “Do we all remember when LinkedIn was really good?” he said to a room full of entrepreneurs, before adding: “Now, it’s just a pain in the neck.”

There were nods of agreement all around. One of them came from the veteran tech-sector founder Ger O’Mahony, who was sitting on stage beside Costley. “I agree,” he said, “I just don’t believe what people are saying about themselves.”

If the current, AI-fuelled version of LinkedIn has a direct opposite in the business networking space, it may be The Entrepreneur Experience – the event Costley and O’Mahony were speaking at.

Organised and managed once again by AxisBIC, it was two days of searing, authentic honesty. “It got very real, very quick,” said another successful entrepreneur, Broadlake’s Brian Crowley.

Regular readers of The Currency will be familiar with the format. Around two dozen emerging entrepreneurs are paired with the same number of experienced business leaders, who mentor them and try to send them home with a clearer idea of the way forward – as well as the sense that their problems and frustrations can be overcome.

The Ballymaloe setting is an important part of the event’s ongoing success: it would be hard to imagine a venue more conducive to what the weekend is all about.

Eamonn Grant, CEO and founder of software company RunCommerce, was one of the emerging cohort. “It was amazing,” he reflected. Grant is an experienced businessman and he has been inside his fair share of rooms where people talk about how to push through. Other environments, he said, “have a competitive nature about them, a dose of bravado and an element of reservation and secrecy”.

Not here.

“The respect everyone has for each other is phenomenal,” Grant added. “There is trust, respect and a push for a higher level of accountability and achievement.”

The full 2026 intake was profiled in this piece. They were first interviewed and then selected by O’Mahony and Teresa Chambers, the founder of Inchera Executive Search and an angel investor with the Boole Syndicate.

What was she looking for, I asked Chambers. She said it’s not easy to come up with the final list, but the kind of qualities needed are resilience and drive, and a passionate belief in your business.

The Entrepreneur Experience has been running since 2011 and the new cohort also became members of a WhatsApp group connected to the event. Many would say it’s a new network infinitely more valuable than running the gauntlet on social media and trying to separate the useful from the junk.

“If I’d had that – oh my God, it would have been so much easier,” O’Mahony said.

Becoming vulnerable quickly

The big thing about The Entrepreneur Experience is this: it doesn’t work if the owners of the fledgling businesses don’t open up. Either they’re properly honest, or they’re better off staying at home.

Whatever resistance they might have come with quickly evaporates – but if they need any further encouragement to share their stories they get it in the various group coaching sessions.

The people mentoring them have no interest in the fake positivity that’s inescapable on LinkedIn. They want the truth – which is almost always a more difficult story to tell when you’re trying to get a business off the ground. But once again, at Ballymaloe, it did work. That was because, as the Itsa Bagel co-founder Peaches Kemp put it, “everyone became vulnerable very quickly”.

That included some entrepreneurs who have made it big, with multi-million-euro exits, and others still driving their businesses forward. There were some notable insights into the kind of mindsets they had, during good times and bad. They said it in different ways, but there was a recurring theme: set yourself in a positive frame of mind before making key decisions, and don’t allow others to see negativity.

Aoibheann O’Brien, co-founder of FoodCloud, talked about losing her nerve when selling tickets to an event when the business was getting going. “We thought, ‘We’ll never sell this’,” she said. They cut the price of the tickets, the event sold out in 15 minutes – and it lost money. The problem, she said, was the negative mindset.

At last year’s event, I spent 45 minutes talking on stage with the Java Republic founder David McKernan and followed up with an in-depth interview in The Currency. He was so honest, perhaps slightly emboldened by good French wine, that he still hasn’t been able to bring himself to read the piece. Whatever he said resonated, though. He got a hugely positive reaction to the interview because it was a classic story of first survival and then success.

McKernan was on a panel this year and he spoke about positivity, as well as not letting anyone see weakness. “If at any stage I had wilted, the banks would have felt it – and we would have been dead,” he said.

On the same panel was Jamie O’Rourke, CEO of the renewable energy and engineering group Mainline. His company’s story is too detailed to get into here, but it emerged from examinership in 2024 and after what O’Rourke called “a 100-day marathon” and he describes himself as a “business survivor”.

Emotion rose within O’Rourke as he recounted that time. But from this difficult experience he learned the benefit of what he called “radical candour” about what’s working in the business and what isn’t.

The theme of the 2026 event was “trust and connection”. One of the questions thrown out there was: who can you trust for advice when you’re in a tight spot and you not sure of the next move? There are times, a few experienced entrepreneurs said, when it’s not going to be the management team around you, no matter how talented.

“Sometimes you need professional, paid-for advisers,” said Teresa Chambers, who was a hugely popular (and almost speechless) inductee to the weekend’s Hall of Fame.

O’Mahony agreed with that, by again showing a little vulnerability himself: “Sometimes you can’t share stuff with your senior team, because you don’t want them to know that you don’t know something.”

But the admirably forthright Costley sounded a note of warning to the owners of businesses scaling up. “I would have a very strong resistance to the creation of advisory boards,” he said. “The biggest problem is they can gang up on you. The problem with seasoned entrepreneurs is we’re incredibly opinionated. And they [board advisers] can think they know better than you how to run your own company.”

A matter of trust

In business, trust comes in many different forms. There’s a view, according to Brian Crowley, that people have to earn your trust as a business leader, and that it must be built up slowly. “I say ‘No’ – give it straight away,” he said.

His point was that, once given, trust is generally repaid handsomely. A talented boxer who represented Ireland, the Clare native is also a big GAA man. Based in the capital now, he is part of the backroom team of the Dublin senior hurlers and he said this same approach to trusting people is one of the reasons they’ll be All-Ireland champions in 2027. When his prediction drew some giggles from the floor, Crowley was defiant: “What are ye laughing at?”

After dinner on the Friday night, I interviewed Larry Bass – the founder, driving force and CEO of ShinAwiL Productions. It was a wide-ranging conversation – from personal challenges to the ups and downs of the business life.

Bass is an articulate, passionate advocate for independent TV and film sector. One of the numerous TV shows he has brought to Ireland was Dragons’ Den, presented here by Richard Curran, and he counts it as perhaps the favourite of his small-screen productions. Bass would spend more time on the Dragons’ Den set than on any of ShinAwiL’s other shows, because he was endlessly fascinated by the hopes and business dreams of the participants.

Another two dozen stories emerged at The Entrepreneur Experience last weekend and Bass played his part in making sure they got a lot out of the two days.

These notes from the event are just fragments of the wider weekend – there were many other conversations in the group sessions and much more that was said privately. All of it came from the same place. The people who have been there and done it wanted to do their best by those still making their way.

Some of the businesses will succeed, others will not, but all of them are led by driven people. They wouldn’t have got through the door otherwise. “The calibre of businesses was off the charts,” said Peaches Kemp.

If past form is anything to go by, a few of the founders will return to Ballymaloe as seasoned entrepreneurs after first attending the event when their businesses needed mentorship. The Media HQ chief executive Jack Murray, Chirp founder Rena Maycock, and Stephen Nolan, CEO of the food technology business Nutritics, were three examples of that this year.

So much was packed in that several of the emerging entrepreneurs said they were exhausted as they said their goodbyes – but they were also energised.

The Entrepreneur Experience is organised and managed by AxisBIC in partnership with Cork City Council, Cork County Council, Broadlake, Quintas Capital, Forvis Mazars, Cyber Innovate at MTU, and The Currency.