Barry Napier, the CEO of Irish tech company Cubic Telecom, on cold plunges, wild turns, and building without a playbook

Walk along an Irish beach at five in the morning on a winter’s day and you might find a surprising sight: Barry Napier, the Irish CEO of Cubic Telecom, plunging into the freezing ocean. 

It’s a habit that Barry and his lifelong friends follow 364 days of the year. (They skip Christmas because there are too many people going for swims with Santa hats on.) “We’re teabags,” Barry says. “We get in the water, swim out, have a little chatter.”

It’s a typically down-to-earth moment for the man who humbly suggests he is used to “not being the smartest person in the room,” despite having become one Ireland’s greatest entrepreneurs, built Cubic Telecom into a communications giant worth more than $1B, and becoming the worthy winner of Endeavor’s 2024 Lindas Award, our highest honor, which celebrates standout entrepreneurs in emerging and underserved markets. 

Barry credits that cold plunge in the morning for getting his endorphins going. “You leave after having a swim in the freezing cold, laughing your arse off,” he said, “with the biggest smile and rosy cheeks, completely energised for the day.”

The future founder grew up on the move, living in Limerick, Dublin and even for a brief stint in Chicago. Paired with this instability, Barry’s dyslexia made academia difficult. He also tragically lost his mother when he was just eleven. “When I came home in the evenings, I couldn’t ask for anything because there was no one there,” he explains. “So I became very self-sufficient.” 

A tough start for anyone, Barry channeled his self-reliance into entrepreneurship. “A very proud moment is when I got nominated for Irish Times Business Person of the Year, because my old teachers read the Irish Times,” he said. “I could imagine them seeing my picture there and biting their lip, thinking, ‘We got that one wrong’.”

Without a college degree or academic background, Barry built his first company in his garage, a distributor for Apple, Samsung and Nokia. By 2008, he’d turned this into one of Ireland’s top 250 companies. But he was ready for more. 

In 2008, the Irish startup ecosystem was almost non-existent, and a recession added to the difficulties facing entrepreneurs at the time. Ireland wouldn’t see its first unicorn until 2018; investment opportunities were lacking and the market was considered small and out of the way, despite its proximity to both Europe and North America. Raising cash was difficult. “Even though we’ve raised over €120M on our journey, the first million was definitely the hardest,” says Barry. Yet Barry was determined to build in Ireland. He took the cash flow from his first business and “started looking around” at other companies.

The company he found was called Cubic Telecom and had four employees. “When we got under the bonnet, there was absolutely nothing there — no underlying technology, no underlying product,” he remembers. Barry and his team got to work, building a company that provides connectivity on a global basis for any high-value mobile asset. Whether it’s a car, tractor unit, or combine harvester, Cubic Telecom can connect it. 

Today, Cubic connects 23 million devices and at the end of 2023, the Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank Corp. bought a 51% stake in the company, valuing it at more than $1B and cementing Barry’s place as one of Ireland’s leading entrepreneurs. Cubic’s transaction has been one of the largest ever tech transactions in Ireland—representing 80% of all dollars invested into Ireland’s tech startups in 2023. 

“Entrepreneurship means that you’re a good leader.”

“You see a moment in time or an opportunity and you can capitalise on that. There are many different factors and a lot of those aren’t taught in college.”

But along with his own personal success, Barry was mostly thrilled about Cubic Telecom’s success on behalf of his team.

“The proudest part for me in that whole journey is that out of €500M in cash, €73M went to the team,” he says. “We really encouraged our team to come on the journey with us, and they got to win. When you’re walking through the company corridors and someone says they got to pay their mortgage or the kids’ tuition, it resonates.” As well as a large number of the staff receiving benefits, the Irish entrepreneurial ecosystem also participated through investments made by ISIF, the Irish sovereign deployment fund, and others local investors. 

Giving back and prioritising his team is a core value for Barry, not least because he credits his team for bringing him through difficult times.

“Being an entrepreneur is very perverse,” Barry says. “There’s highs and lows. There’s that nauseous feeling that you didn’t get the contract or you’re close to the edge of bankruptcy. If I look back at the history of my companies, there were some hairy times where I was scratching my head, wondering will the electricity work tomorrow? A lot of entrepreneurs have that. It’s a defining moment for an entrepreneur, how you manage yourself and how you manage your team. At Cubic, we did hit the wall on a couple of occasions. And we just went through that wall, and the team followed us. Having the support of a really good team around me gave me that drive.”

Now, Barry’s vision has expanded beyond valuing and rewarding his own team and into the wider entrepreneurial community in Ireland, which is why Endeavor has become so significant to him. Having joined as the first entrepreneur in Ireland, Barry helped kick-start the network at home. Today, there are now 17 entrepreneurs from 12 of the fastest-scaling companies on the island of Ireland in the community and many more to come. 

He sees the value of the network for founders, which is why he became a Board Member in 2024, creating another first for Ireland – becoming the first Endeavor Entrepreneur to join the Board in Ireland, alongside fellow EE, Sam Dennigan. “When I did my ISP (International Selection Panel to become an Endeavor Entrepreneur), I met Javier Villamizar, [Operating Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers]. He grilled me through the ISP – he really gave me a hard time! But afterward he coached me and put in time for me, and he was so helpful.” Barry must have made a good impression; Softbank Corp. bought a 51% stake for 473M euros in 2023. Barry continues to lead the team as CEO today. 

Now, as a board member, Barry continues to support and mentor the next generation of emerging entrepreneurs locally. “Being a CEO is a very lonely place,” Barry says. “Everyone thinks you have the answers, and then you make mistakes. But at Endeavor I met a lot of like-minded individuals who had the same problems, and then I could have those like-minded conversations.”

It’s time for him to expand his own influence in Ireland, in a rousing showcase of the Endeavor Multiplier Effect™, where the work we do with entrepreneurs is paid forward by inspiring, mentoring, and investing in the next generation of founders. Barry’s commitment to the multiplier effect is a key component of why he’s won the Lindas Award, and he’s determined to offer up-and-coming entrepreneurs a smoother path to success than the one he climbed.

Barry has also instilled that ‘pay it forward’ mindset in his own team, with members of his SLTs now actively involved in peer-to-peer groups with other Endeavor Ireland scaleups, each supporting each other. 

“We need to share those with others coming up as fast as we can, so they can succeed quicker than I did. And the work we did put Ireland back on the map again. We showed that it wasn’t just Israel and Silicon Valley that have all the startup success. The Irish are packing a punch.”

And then there’ll be more successes like Cubic Telecom?

“No,” says Barry, smiling. “There’s going to be bigger successes. Cubic set a bar, and CEOs are very competitive. They’re going to want to beat me and I hope they do. We’re not the bar, we’re just the watermark. So watch out for what’s coming out of Ireland soon.”