Back in the mid-1990s, Michael Flannery was instrumental in smoothing the way for Northern Ireland companies to set up in New York City through his involvement with the Friends of Belfast organization.
Now, as efforts to bring jobs to the North of Ireland step up under the aegis of U.S. Special Economic Envoy Joseph Kennedy III, the New York V.C. veteran is about to renew his economic bond with the region.
Speaking by phone to the Irish Echo recently from his Saratoga Springs, NY home, Flannery recalls the early 90s as a time “where there was a lot of cooperation between the (N.Y.C.) administration. “At the time,” Flannery said, “the Giuliani administration was coming in, there was millions of square feet of open inventory of commercial space in downtown Manhattan. And that's where Silicon Alley emerged with a lot of cooperation between public and private partnerships.”
Flannery credits Michael Carey, son of former New York Governor Hugh Carey, and then President of the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC), with facilitating that spirit of cooperation.
Governor Carey, Flannery noted, “had been instrumental in a lot of relationships between Ireland and New York, adding, “with me being fortunate enough to be a part of that clan, I said (to Michael Carey) let’s get involved with friends of Belfast, let's bring in some of your other friends.”
Together, Flannery said Friends of Belfast and the EDC sought to bring “the best entrepreneurs from Belfast, to New York, maybe versus Boston, let's say.”
Flannery saw his role as “bringing people together for networking; entrepreneurs, venture capitalist investors, and then enterprise customers.” “That's what I would do,” Flannery explained. “I would always build a Talent Bridge; a lot of my background is executive search and technology companies with Redwood Partners. That's how I got into the venture capital business (with Grit V.C.).”
It was all part of a multi-pronged strategy employed by Flannery to build up his own experience while simultaneously continuing to build those bridges between New York and Belfast.
“I was exploring several different things professionally,” Flannery told The Irish Echo. “One was building my talent skill set where I could build international teams. And the second one was finding amazing entrepreneurs that needed capital, and needed to come into the U.S. And so that was kind of my origin story, where I was building a transatlantic practice, where we could do executive search, we were able to invest and have an investment bank as well.”
That investment bank, which was founded by Flannery in 1994, was initially called Redwood Capital Group, before eventually changing its name to Drake Star Partners, described by its founder as “an award winning boutique.”
Flannery believes that after that promising start for the New York to Belfast pathway, “there was sort of the lost opportunity (that) occurred over time,” a situation that he sees as coming back together.
Two key events to renew that bond will take place later this year - in June, Flannery will address the New York-New Belfast conference in the New York Athletic Club and in the fall he will travel to Belfast to join the Belfast International Homecoming.
As an example of the burgeoning transatlantic start-up bonds, Flannery cites Seamus McAteer, “one of our entrepreneurs.” “Seamus is a fabulous story,” he said, “a serial entrepreneur.” McAteer is a previous recipient of the Spirit of the Diaspora Award at the Belfast Homecoming and has strong links to the city despite being a native of Dublin.
“Right now his company's called Speech Labs. He's in Silicon Valley and Speech Labs is a generative AI company.” Involved in the industry of the moment, what does Speech Labs do?
Flannery explains. “Let’s say you and I did a nice TED Talk. And we took that video and we fed it into the Speech Labs platform, it will come back with a perfect dub of you and I, and it could be in Japanese, Spanish, we can't quite do Gaelic yet.”
“But,” Flannery enthuses, “think about how powerful that is from a media standpoint. In the past, the production money that you'd have to spend to be able to take your content and create it in other languages, where you have both the speech to text on the screen, and then guess what; our lips are moving perfectly, the pace of the language, and that our voices are clones, we can do other things with this as well.”
“So, Seamus is a good example of somebody with a strong Belfast network, he's come to the US as an entrepreneur. And, you know, we've invested in multiple times, and this is our newest investment with him.”
These investments are made via Grit Capital Partners, a venture capital company that Flannery is a partner in.
As a reason for his success in varied fields, Flannery cites his having gone to a small school, Cazenovia College in upstate New York, with giving him, “a chip on my shoulder for not having gone to a Harvard, or somewhere like that.”
Married with two daughters, Flannery splits his time between Saratoga Springs and an office at Bryant Park, New York City.
