Entrepreneurship
Dr. O’Mahony has always been fascinated by the entrepreneurial process. For more than 10 years, he taught software engineering students a course module entitled CSU44081 Entrepreneurship & High-Tech Venture Creation. This course was heavily suscribed and inspired many student to either work with startups or create their own.
In addiiton to teaching, O’Mahony was also personally quite involved in entrepreneurial ventures. In 1998/99, O’Mahony was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to spend a sabbatical year at Stanford, California. In addition to his research work at Stanford he became involved with the very active technology entrepreneurship programme. He started a web company called LetterPost.Com in late 1998. A business plan was developed in conjunction with a colleague and entered into Stanford Entrepreneur’s E-Challenge where it was repeatedly subjected to the scrutiny of judges from the Sand Hill road venture capital community and reached the final of the competition [24Mb Newsclip from Channel 4 News, NY Times Article]. O’Mahony continued as CEO of letterpost.com until it was acquired by the Escher Group in 2000.
In the early 2000s, he founded a national X.509 certification authority called Ezitrust.com competing with international corporations like Verisign and home grown competition in the form of the Irish Post office.
Other startups that O’Mahony has been involved with include Metakall.com and Xcelerit.Com.