WILDGEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD: Philip Berber - co-founder, A Glimmer of Hope, Austin, Texas

“FORTUNE FAVOURS the brave” is Philip Berber’s encouragement to graduates looking to create opportunities for themselves in these straitened times.

Selling his online stockbroking service, CyBerCorp for $488 million (€365 million) in 2000, the UCD graduate’s brave entrepreneurial moves delivered him a fortune that he and his family have chosen to use in helping those less fortunate.

Growing up in Donnybrook, the fact that it was “a 15 minute walk from my bedroom to the lecture theatre at Belfield” meant the BComm student had no excuse to skip class.

Graduating in 1979 when “things were pretty bleak in Ireland”, he was keen to spread his wings. “I just felt there would be a lot more opportunities in London at the time and that proved to be the case.”

While describing his first five years in London working with US corporations such as Ford, Avon Cosmetics and Bausch Lomb as “really helpful”, the experience proved to him that working in large corporations was not how he wanted to spend the rest of his career.

In 1984, Berber joined the first of a series of entrepreneurial start-ups that would characterise his career over the next 15 years. “The area we were involved in used the predecessor of the internet. We were using dial-up computers in the mid-80s, linking insurance agents and brokers with a central computer that gave insurance quotes,” he explains.

Fascinated by how advanced technologies could be applied to the financial markets, Berber’s next move was to a London-based computer systems company.

“From there I saw the opportunity to apply these advanced technologies to the financial market and that was when a kind of a light bulb came on for me,” says Berber who, in his late 20s decided to take the plunge with his own start-up, Financia.

His idea was to use computers to predict financial markets, generating buy and sell signals for traders. His customers grew to include large banks and brokerage houses who used his predictive trading systems to make money.

Merging Financia with a Texas-based firm in the same field, his desk moved to Houston and the business culture stateside was one he embraced.

“For me, America, and the American business mindset, was the land of entrepreneurial opportunity,” he says.

“It excited me to work in that environment where people were encouraged to take risks and where failure was not frowned upon but was, in some regards, seen as an asset.”

“Coming from Dublin, if you fail, in some respects you go to the back of the class. In America, you failed and you went on to the next thing. The game was not over, you were still in the game.”

Berber’s next move, a company called GK Capital, which used computer models to trade in the currency markets, saw him move to his current hometown of Austin. From there, he started CyBerCorp.

“It was around 1995/96 and I sensed there was tremendous opportunity with the emergence of this internet thing,” he recalls. It led him to think about how he could expand what he was doing with technology for financial market prediction to build a trading system where traders could buy and sell US stocks online at high speeds.

In four years, CyBerCorp grew to 120 people and was generating eye-watering revenues.

“Every time someone bought or sold, we were receiving the brokerage – there was half a million dollars a day in online brokerage commissions with thousands of customers doing tens of thousands of trades a day,” he says.

But probably Berber’s cleverest move was to sell-up fast, to a bigger player Charles Schwab.

“CyBerCop was sold for half a billion dollars about two weeks before the internet bubble burst,” he recalls. “I often get asked ‘how did you do that?’ and my answer is ‘the great investment banker in the sky’.

“None of us has a crystal ball . . . I didn’t know how long this period of excessive valuations for dot coms would last. I was just very fortunate to sell when I did.” Berber was aged 41.

He credits his wife Donna as the inspiration behind setting up the A Glimmer of Hope, a family foundation that takes an entrepreneurial approach to aid, working with the rural poor in Ethiopia to lift themselves out of poverty.

“I went out to Ethiopia a couple of months after I sold CyBerCorp and understood a very, very different world from the one I had been playing in. It was the first time in my life I saw and touched and smelled poverty in a human form that I did not know existed,” he says.

Together with Donna, he says they sought to turn the traditional model of aid where he says “so much money is wasted and so little gets to the people in need” on its head.

Berber says Glimmer is “less about a handout and more about a hand up”.

The Berbers also made a commitment that 100 per cent of donor dollars would go directly to those in need – “we pay all our own expenses, overheads and salaries; when somebody donates a dollar, all of it goes to people in need”.

Ten years down that line, Berber says “two and a half million Ethiopians today have clean drinking water and/or classrooms and/or healthcare for their children and/or microfinance so that they can create their own economic progress. We call it ‘a good start’.”

While being in business was “very ego-driven”, he says his work now brings “a deep personal and emotional fulfilment and the joy of giving and being in service to those in need”.

To graduates following in his footsteps, Berber predicts that while this economic dip isn’t going to go away quickly, it’s an environment in which current graduates need to be willing to take risks and get out of their comfort zone.

“That for me is a great environment for young entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs to get on with their careers or try to make the world a better place.”

* This article was re-edited on December 9th, 2011.Mr Berber sold his business in 2000 for $488 million, not billion.