WILD GEESE:Claire Hayes  Managing director of emerging companies services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Silicon Valley  

FOR SILICON VALLEY start-ups on the brink of the big time, it’s important to get their affairs in order first, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) consultant Claire Hayes is just the person to whip them into shape.

A valley veteran of 13 years, the Dubliner’s day job is to make sure the entrepreneurs she advises, buzzed up by their big idea, also get the basics right.

“If you have a company that sees a window for an IPO exit, you don’t want to have any slip up on the administration side that could delay your filing,” she says.

As managing director of PwC’s services for emerging companies in the US, Hayes’s team chaperones fledgling companies through the whole gamut of growing pains from equity transactions to IPOs, carve-outs to merger and acquisitions.

With clients that have included eBay and a gaggle of life sciences and medical device companies, her department puts the scaffolding in place to make sure they grow on a sound footing.

“I try to make entrepreneurs aware that there are certain things they need to be thinking of. I say, you might not be ready for it now but there are things that may come down the road.”

With a BComm from UCD, Hayes got her chartered accountancy stripes with Mazars before jumping to PwC for a role in Guernsey in 1994. Though the 24-year-old had a job in Dublin, emigration was part of the DNA of her generation.

“Growing up in the 1980s, unemployment was bad and there were always these pessimistic predictions. When I was in college, most people thought they’d probably just go away and get a job outside of Ireland,” says Hayes.

Working in the Channel Islands tax haven for three years, Hayes says she got to learn much about financial services, insurance funds and banking, but when an opportunity came up to transfer to PwC’s expanding practice in Eastern Europe, she found herself in Warsaw.

“It appealed because it was less well developed,” she says. “There were only a couple of restaurants there available to Westerners but you could feel it was the start of something amazing there.”

With the Berlin Wall in rubble and Eastern Bloc countries embracing the new, post-communist future, Hayes says it was an exciting time. Advising start-ups in the tech and telecoms sector, she says “Polish businesses were really embracing the new world and wanted to become like Western businesses”.

Simultaneously, Western businesses were clambering to get a foothold in the newly accessible market.

By 1999, Hayes got itchy feet again and moved from one of the world’s newest markets to one of its most evolved, her current base of Silicon Valley. “I was thrown right in to work on an IPO so you immediately got a sense of the frenzied activity here in Silicon Valley and what it was like to work in a place where innovation was happening all the time.”

But within a year things changed. “By 2000, it was pretty clear that that was going or gone,” she says. “I could definitely see that there were companies that were just closing down. Companies that had a hot internet idea which people would have jumped on a few months earlier, it just wasn’t taking off.

“The appetite was waning, the interest in the internet space was going away. There just wasn’t as many companies coming out of the pipeline.”

With tech hitting a speed bump, Hayes diversified into medical device and biotech companies but she says technology is now very much in revival again. “There are so many companies being developed in San Francisco today, there is a real buzz, particularly around social media and daily deal companies.”

In fact, she says, 2011 proved a bumper year for investment with PwC research showing a 38 per cent jump in venture capital funding deals for software companies year on year.

And with new innovation has come a new breed of challenges for her to tackle on her clients’ behalf.

“If you are a social networking company, you need to think about your international tax strategy. If you are in e-tail, there may be VAT issues. There is a big push now on privacy too, and where your IP is located – a company might be early stage but it needs to think about things that are going to impact on their business as it grows.”

Volunteering as an advocate for children in the California court system, the Malahide woman says, has helped her to become more rooted in her adopted home.

“It helped me to get to know what’s going on, to get to know others outside of a particular circle and not be caught up in the bubble of work.”

To those following in her footsteps, she says Valley visitors can expect positivity.

“There is an openness to help the person next to you succeed. There is optimism for the next idea and people talk about the good things. They know that if jobs are created and ideas are built on, it makes this a better place.”

Claire Hayes will be speaking at Techovate 2012 in the Wexford Opera House on March 21st and 22nd