Entrepreneur and investor Mary McKenna, MBE, shakes things up. She uses her experience to support female investment issues in Ireland. Discovering new areas of the startup ecosystem from her door step in Donegal to destinations around the globe, she shares with Fiona Alston the value of women investing in women and breaking the burgh boundaries with your network.
This is not my first conversation with Mary McKenna but as I settle into the call I know I’m about to hear some new nuggets of information and a story or two about how networking got her the positions I’m keen to enquire about. How do I know this? Because McKenna is a super connector, something I’ve taken full advantage of since she first came across my radar on Twitter with AwakenHub.
For those of you unfamiliar with AwakenHub, it’s an Irish community of women founders McKenna co-founded with Clare McGee, Sinead Crowley and Denise McQuaid. McKenna’s an exited serial tech entrepreneur, she co-founded and subsequently sold successful Irish online learning business, Learning Pool.
The women have taken all their experiences of entrepreneurship and poured it into AwakenHub so that Irish female founders can get the best of the experiences they had, and avoid the worst of them.
The same team also founded AwakenAngels, an Irish women-led angel syndicate which began actively investing in September 2024. To date it has made seven investments into women-owned businesses based in Ireland (with four more currently in due diligence).
“Angel investing is a great opportunity for women to get more involved in start-ups and to share their professional skills by investing in other women,” McKenna tells me.
“We’ve made our angel syndicate so that the money that you put in goes straight into the companies [not overheads] – you can get started with AwakenAngels for €2,000. The reason that we made it such a low entry level price was because we want founders to invest as well,” she explains.
“Because if a founder invests, they learn an awful lot more about how the investment process works than they do trying to learn it out of a textbook or be taught by somebody else, because they’re putting their own money into somebody else, so they instantly start to think more like an investor.”
This is not just about founders she points out, it’s women helping women Women in business investing their money, skills and knowledge into the start-up ecosystem. For example if accountants or lawyers became angel investors that’s a whole lot of knowledge and expertise they could pass on to someone they have invested into.
Our conversation soon turns to networking, if it is a super power then McKenna deserves the cape. She has some pretty strong views on it.
“The saddest thing that I ever hear anybody say is when a woman says they know networking is really important, but they just don’t have enough time to do it – which I do hear more frequently than I would like to. My heart just sinks because networking honestly is the start and end of everything – it’s where everything happens and where everything comes from,” she says.
I mention to Mckenna about her gig as an Innovation Expert for the European Union on its €9bn EIC Accelerator and ask her how that came about. She goes on to tell me how networking on social media led to her call up to the EU.
It began as a message on LinkedIn from a guy from the European Union she’d never met asking if she was interested in being a jury member for the new accelerator they were launching. She replied saying “I don’t know you, how did you come across me” and that’s where she found out it was from a previous ‘opportunity’ she had taken.
“He said, I came across your profile because you’re one of the Entrepreneurs in Residence at University of Oxford,” she explains. Apparently this man was confident Mary would be a fit as she’d been ‘vetted’ by the business school at Oxford.
Funnily enough the University Oxford opportunity came about through a Twitter connection. She’d be in touch with a professor of innovation at the business school for a few years and one day, when a jury member dropped out of a VC challenge competition she got the call up, to which of course she accepted thinking, again, it would be a great way to improve her network.
“The moral of the tale is, if you never go anywhere, and you’re very fixed in your views and your opinions about things, and you’re not open minded to new opportunities, then nothing new ever happens, does it?” she says. “Whereas, if you do one thing, sometimes it does lead on to other interesting things that just come your way. But you have to be out there in order for people to know about you and find you.”
Networking is at the core of AwakenAngels providing great value to the founders. The four co-founders have large networks so there is always going to be someone somewhere that could be useful.
“I would see one of our jobs as helping people, that are just starting out, to be able to easily locate a person or a network that can help them, or can invest in them quickly, without wasting a lot of time – that’s going to save that founder hours or weeks or months of running around trying to locate the right person,” she says.
When it comes to expanding her network lately, Mary has been expanding it to Central Europe and the Baltics region. She announced lately she has become an independent non-executive investment committee member of Coinvest, a sovereign VC fund in Lithuania which co-invests with angel investors. What’s unique about the fund is co-investors can avail of a generous profit-sharing scheme on successful exit. Coinvest limits its return on investment to 6% compound annual interest, and all excess returns transferred to accredited co-investors in a specific startup company.
What really attracted Mary to look in Lithuania’s direction was when she met the fund’s managing director Viktorija Trimbel at an event in Prague where Trimbel told her that Lithuania was the fastest growing startup ecosystem in the CE and Baltics region.
“I mean, for somebody who’s an entrepreneur or an investor getting told something like that, it’s like gold dust, isn’t it? You couldn’t drive me away with a stick – I was itching to have a look and get into it and find out more,” she said.
“One of the benefits of syndicates collaborating across Europe is it gives founders a bigger pool of investors to choose from and gives investors more varied deal flow and the ability to more quickly diversify their portfolio,” she adds.
Our conversation turns to how Irish female founders or women in business might approach stepping outside their own ecosystem and exploring all the good networking that Europe has to offer. I ask McKenna for a few tips for those of you looking to broaden your horizons.
Get on to a meaningful trade mission that somebody sensible is curating, that’s an excellent way to catapult yourself into a new geography. AwakenAngels do an annual trip to the US, taking 20 female founders (who pay for themselves) Stateside to hold meetings and network in New York and Boston. McKenna has recently returned from the Bay Area to meet a woman who is going to start helping the network with female tech connections on the West Coast.
Applying for European competitions like the Women TechEU, because even if you don’t get selected, you kind of get swept up a little bit into the slipstream. There is value in just applying.
Being aware of what the EU is doing in the different member states, but also more centrally and going along to those information days, because they’re jam packed full of investors. It’s very easy to meet people and talk to them at the EIC (European Innovation Council) information days, for example.
Meet overseas people at Irish events. Delegations from overseas can often be found at events like the Dublin Tech Summit.
Apply to be a speaker whenever you see a speaker opportunity that’s appropriate to your business. Write in, drop them an email, say that you’re interested. See if you can take a small sponsorship in return for a speaking slot – beat them down on the price because you’re a start-up.
Go and say hello to the people in the embassy when you’re overseas on business. This is how AwakenAngels has such a strong connection with the Embassy in New York and Boston, because they met those ambassadors when they were in roles in Europe.
Bring on an angel investor from a new territory. That’s the main reason why AwakenAngels focuses so much on the US – all Irish founders with a growth mindset want customers there and being Irish there is a great diaspora advantage.
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