On Mount Pleasant Avenue, in the residential heart of Rathmines, lies a building in a driveway that looks like just any other house in the area.

Irish Country Living is met at the door by Paddy Cosgrave. This building is, in fact, the home of the Web Summit, and Paddy, the MD, is going to show me around.

Suddenly, the tempo of my afternoon cranks up a pace. This “house” is a maze of offices and Paddy leaps and bounds from one room to the next, introducing me to groups of 25 people at once, demanding to know who are from farms. His well-over six-foot frame legs it up and down higgledy-piggledy staircases, with me in hot pursuit. We cut across corridors where employees are settled on couches and decked out in jeans while cradling their laptops.

I just about get time to pause for breath in the “hang out” area where the floor is made of fake grass, then we’re off again, whizzing by screens where figures and charts are flickering, documenting progress in real time.

We eventually land in an office and the interview can begin.

So what are all these employees – all 100 of them – doing?

They’re organising the Web Summit and, given the event is bringing 20,000 people to Dublin from 100 counties, 500 speakers and 1000 journalists, they have their work cut out for them. The Web Summit is a technological conference, with talks from some of the biggest and best-known tech entrepreneurs in the world. There will also be a large number of tech start-ups exhibiting, and last year the opening of the Nasdaq market took place live on stage.

Summit participants include Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox, Hollywood actress Eva Longoria and British model and actress Lily Cole, who founded social network Impossible. The Mount Pleasant office is also kept busy with a growing number of other conferences that the organisation is running: Collision, which takes place in Vegas in May; Sync in Hong Kong in July; and Machine Con in Vegas next September.

Paddy is the driving force behind all of this. From a dairy farm in Co Wicklow, he says there were two things his dad did: “He milked cows and he coded. He was obsessed with programming and hardware.”

Paddy grew up “always tinkering with computers” and when he went on to do BESS in Trinity, he was “always working with other people and making bits of software”.

The very first web summit was in Bewley’s hotel in October 2009 when Paddy was 26.

“I organised that out of my bedroom. We moved offices to my sitting room and by the summer of 2010 Dave Kelly decided to help. A few months later, Daire Hickey joined and it was really the three of us that put together a 400-person event in 2010 – that was the first real moment that I thought, wow, maybe there’s something here.”

Big names

The first “big name” the guys secured was Nikolas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype. The founder of YouTube and the founder of Twitter were all there that first year too.

So is Paddy the most ridiculously well-connected person on the planet, or how did he mange to get them? Apparently not. “It just required a lot of hustle, you just had to badger them constantly and find their Gmail. I just hunted them down on Skype and talked to them on Skype and explained that they should come to this event and it was going to be lots of fun.”

Paddy is charming, smart and articulate (and taken – sorry ladies – he’s engaged to farmers’ daughter, model and founder of a sweater start-up from outside Dongeal, Faye Dinsmore).

No doubt a combination of these three traits, though more probably the former, was influential in the techpreneurs booking airplane seats.

At this point we are interrupted by his dog Fluffy “who’s a cross between who knows what”. She performs a variety of tricks upon request, including giving me a high five and shaking my hand. And all this while his army of recruits are beavering away outside – Paddy definitely runs a tight ship.

“We use a system called OKRs, which is the same as what’s in Google. Paddy notes that in the internet age, everything that everybody does can be transparent and he looks at what objective results say about his employees.

Farming background

Paddy’s farming background means a lot to him. He likes hiring the children of farmers, taxi-drivers and teachers, but most particularly farmers because “they realise that real life is actually hard work”.

Paddy introduces us to 26-year-old Stephen Twomey, a Web Summit employee from a dairy farm in Dungourney, Co Cork. Stephen is on the press team and deals with journalists from the most high-profile media organisations in the world, such as The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, on a daily basis.

“I’d love to think in 10 years time that I’d be like with Facebook – that I’d be staff member number eight of an amazing Irish success story.”

An important feature of the Web Summit are the “night summits” which are pub crawls of Dublin, led by everyone from Bono to Jamie Heaslip.

“People mighn’t like the idea of taking 5,000 people on a pub crawl on the opening night, but real business is being done.”

Paddy relays a tale of Jamie Heaslip meeting John Molloy – one of the first investors in Paypal – on one such crawl, and securing an investment of one million dollars in a tech start-up by the end of the night.

Tickets for the Web Sumit may cost €805 (at the time of going to print)but it’s hard to put a price on networking like that.

“Business keeps on changing and, with that, how people do business,” adds Paddy. “I think maybe for an older generation (while most of them embrace it, some say) going on a pub crawl, well that’s not serious, nobody serious will be on that. But there’s billionaires traipsing around Dublin doing Jaeger bombs. It’s real life.”

The fact that Paddy gets to mix with some of the most famous people in the world isn’t really a draw for him.

“The first thing is, I’m in no way interested in that and, secondly, you meet them and you realise that this is just a person as well, these are just very average people with the same concerns as you – they might have a troublesome 12-year-old that’s really annoyed they’re missing Halloween and coming to Dublin for it.”

Food summit

Paddy feels the Food Summit is his proudest achievement. Last year this saw him recruit Margaret Jeffares and Good Food Ireland to feed 10,000 people, after initially approaching them just 10 days before the conference. The Food Summit is taking place again this year where 400 Good Food Ireland producer and chef members will feed the masses at the event.

Paddy’s farming background has made him very empathetic towards the food sector and has also helped nurture his entrepreneurial spirit.

“Of course, you’re a product of your upbringing, and I saw my dad struggling as a farmer. I think for long periods of time in Ireland, being a farmer is a very frustrating thing, very challenging.

“Nothing comes to those who wait, you’ve got to go out and do it yourself and I’m pretty much unemployable (I’d be too much trouble for anybody, I’d be a bit unruly), so I pretty much had no choice but to go out and start my own business.”

Paddy is passionate about several topics but food and agriculture are to the forefront. This vivacious, enthusiastic bundle of energy, who sometimes may err on being over-idealistic, was refreshing company, so it’s a feature on him that should conclude in his own words: “I’m optimistic, I think you’ve got to be, I wouldn’t be in the country if I wasn’t optimistic. I’m very optimistic because the human spirit is indomitable. It just endlessly moves forward and no matter how bad the bad times are, people just want a better future for their kids or for themselves.” CL

Web summit

Described as the “best technology conference on the planet”, the Web Summit takes place in the RDS from 4-6 November. It has a jam-packed lineup of over 500 speakers, with over 20,000 attendees traveling to Dublin from over 100 countries. For more information on the event or if you wish to book a ticket, visit www.websummit.net