Leo McCanna

I started to study SEE in 1984 - Electronic, Telecommunications and Computers Engineering, at DIT Kevin Street. I graduated in 1988.

An educational memory would be Gerry Farrell’s lecture on information theory. My non-educational memories that stand out most are playing pool in the old students union pre-Atrium, and starting a tennis society.

In 1993 - almost 30 years ago by the time this article comes out!

At the end of my fourth year, I did my J-1 VISA in the US where I worked with a US military contractor on their mainframes and super-computers - mostly fetching printouts and changing backup takes. I came back to Dublin for my 21st birthday party, mostly with college friends who I still know, and then I went off to Japan to work for Ricoh. As it happens, 14 people from my class that year ended up in Japan – a huge number for such a far away place that at that time had very few foreign engineers of any nationality! Some have stayed, married, had kids and set up businesses there.

In Ricoh, I had fascinating work in their Image Processing Research and Development department. We had access to really modern computer equipment, engineers, and Japanese work training and methods. Like others who travelled to Japan on this programme, I worked under local-hire Japanese ‘sarariman’ conditions - staying in a dormitory with Japanese colleagues, eating in the canteen and often going days and weeks without seeing other Irish people. They had a drive on in Japan to burnish their R&D credentials so we were targeted with producing one patent application per month. I didn’t quite make one a month, but quite a few did get accepted by the Japanese patent office and at least two in the US, of which I am particularly proud.

Two years in a dormitory was long enough for me however, so I changed jobs after two years to Credit Suisse in Tokyo. I had always been interested in business and as an avid and skilled computer programmer there was lots of useful and interesting work for me to do in a bank. I learned a lot about business and finance there, both through the applications I wrote, including a position-keeping one on the currency trading floor and others to value complex financial products, and also through an online learning system that they had purchased for employees use and which I later discovered was provided by Intuition – an Irish company whose CEO I now know!

In 1992 I returned to Ireland and started an Executive MBA in UCD’s Smurfit School, while retaining a part-time remote work contract with Credit Suisse to pay the bills. It was during this that I started Ocuco with an ex-classmate from Kevin Street, Lewis McMahon.

We provide software for opticians. I got to meet a few in Kevin Street! Indeed one of them, Paul Whelan, helped me to structure the program I wrote along the lined of the exam structure trained in the college. This is now used by opticians across the world. While SEE is more of an engineering than a programming course, I believe engineering is an excellent background for managing the trade-offs and numerical aptitude required to build and run a business.

Do it. Start as early as you can. Don’t wait for, well, whatever the excuse you are using to delay it is! The single biggest determinant of net worth at a given age of entrepreneurs that I have observed is the age at which they started. You have to learn entrepreneurship through doing it.

It was a very proud moment for me to see Ocuco’s name above a lab in my Alma Mater among the names of the other multinational companies supporting the NOC. Ocuco has built a global stature in the industry and we came from Kevin Street!