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This past Thursday evening, an ad hoc delegation of Irish high-tech entrepreneurs visited Brickhouse. They heard from Jumpcut entrepreneur and co-founder Mike Folgner, who now leads Yahoo! Video; from Salim Ismail, head of Brickhouse, who spoke about some current projects and the process for selecting new ideas to build; and from Chad Dickerson, who reminisced about his recent visit to Dublin for Mashup Camp and spoke about the hacker-culture renaissance at Yahoo!. The visiting Irish were even treated to an unplanned photo op with Jerry Yang.

The group calls itself Paddy's Valley, and was founded for the purpose of visiting Silicon Valley and getting on the radar of VCs, influencers, and tech leaders at large Internet companies based in the Bay Area. Despite the fact that many of these startups compete for mindshare and funding, they figured that by banding together on a "trade mission" they could create a more likely scenario for being seen and heard. I found this example of purposeful real-world networking almost as intriguing as the business plans and product demos I saw.

Don't get me wrong, these young companies are building cool stuff. The pitches we heard were engaging and well-presented. Plus, members of the Paddy's Valley delegation had the noted charm of the Irish working in their favor. But the distinctly collaborative, emergent approach for gaining the attention of busy business leaders seemed almost as innovative as the product pitches themselves.

It was a great pleasure sharing beer and pizza (what else?) and gabbing on a rainy, wet December evening with the founders of startups creating niche social networks, mobile apps and content services, media-sharing sites, distributed storage services, and task-based verticals with social components for sports, travel, and more.

Check out the startups we learned about, the founders we met. And please let me know if I'm missing any "Padbrothers" or sisters:

• bench'd
• coclarity
• GlowDay
• MobaNode
• Nubiq
• pix.ie
• PutPlace
• RelevantM
• Toddle (from a Dublin design consultancy with a brilliant name, SpoiltChild)
• TouristR

Logo from bandon1. Used with permission from Conor O'Neill (bandon1).

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