From Trinity to SuperAwesome Dylan Collins, entrepreneur and founder of SuperAwesome, chats to Eva Short about the children’s privacy company and shares some insights from his journey to success D ylan Collins stores up materials that interest him during the week and pores through them in one marathon, usually on a Friday. He gravitates towards physical books and eschews, where possible, screen-reading. One of his favourite past-times is to, once finished reading a physical book, leave it in a public place in the hopes that a curious stranger will pick it up. ‘I like to leave really good books in places for people to find them. I think it’s one journalism or similarly waded into the world of business and building companies. The value of the experience was the sense of agency that these activities gave him and his friends; the first taste of independence, running things and having control over a budget. The successes were gratifying and the failures were very much theirs to own. of the best gifts that you can give to people.’ ‘We used to sell advertising across Trinity He is something of a generalist; he read, that morning, articles on agricultural policy through to investment reports, and as one might expect, the latest developments in the formation of legislation for regulating children’s We used to sell advertising across Trinity News and the News and the associated magazines. We learned so much there; it was the first real exposure to actually running things and owning a budget. It was hugely formative.’ It was through publications that use of the internet. associated magazines. Collins met Seán Blanchfield and Ronan Perceval, with whom he founded The 42-year-old has blazed a trail for We learned so Phorest, his first company. Phorest himself as one of the country’s foremost tech superstars. The Tipperary-born much there initially started as a text messaging service for businesses, which then evolved, under Collins graduated from Business, Economics Perceval’s leadership, into a highly successful and Social Studies in 2002. He described himself salon appointment booking platform. When Perceval as an ‘average’ student who often found himself dropping split off to continue with Phorest, Blanchfield and Collins went into lectures that were outside of his curriculum. ‘I went to on to set up Demonware, an Irish software company that was more lectures that I didn’t need to go to, than the ones that then acquired by Activision Blizzard, the gaming giant. actually were required. I ended up hanging out in the computer science department.’ ‘Demonware came about from the fact that Séan and I were One of the most formative elements of Collins’ Trinity experience was his extra-curricular activities. ‘Our whole crew came out of publications,’ Collins explained, noting that of the playing a lot of Counter-Strike at the time. We realised back in the early 2000s that the future of online gaming was going to be multiplayer.’ cohort he came up with, many either remained in media and
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